


The stars remind me of you

by fujoshism (fancypineapple)



Category: EXO (Band), HOTSHOT (Band), SHINee, VIXX
Genre: Blood, M/M, OOC Timo, Possibly OOC Ravi, Use of stagenames as real names, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7427377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fancypineapple/pseuds/fujoshism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bounty hunter Kai crashes onto clueless but lovely amnesiac Lee Taemin. Cue Adventures On Space™.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The stars remind me of you

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by cowboy bebop, originally posted on january 14, 2015. commission for lu. crossposted from my LJ fic comm fujoshism.

Let’s get this out of the way: Styx is an honest-to-god icy shithole. As habitable as anything past Neptune can be, yes, but even Triton is just an ice rink with colonies in it, and Styx is far from being any better. If anything, Kai bitterly thinks as he races through gelid streets, Styx in its best days resembles Triton in its worst days. Styx is just too cold.

“Too cold!”, Kai thinks out loud as frost once again takes over his helmet’s visor. “TOO COLD!!”, he reiterates as he has to lift the visor, and frost attacks his skin instead. “How do human beings actually live here!!”, he wonders in outrage as he pursues a two-thousand woolong bounty head through the empty, frozen streets of S-XIII.

“You complain too much,” comes the expected retort from the transmitter.

“Well, what can I say? IT’S TOO COLD DOWN HERE!!” Kai makes a show of shouting as close to his end of the transmitter as he can, and takes a little bit of pleasure in imagining his shipmate grimace at the noise. “Do you have any idea how cold it is? I’d like to see you come down and feel it for yourself!”

“I’ll pass. Also, you insisted in coming down personally,” Kai’s shipmate points out, and, to Kai’s chagrin, he’s right. “ _Leave him to me, Ravi, I’m the fastest between us both, I’m super fast, I can do this—_ ”

“I don’t speak like that!! I—fuck,” Kai realizes a little too late that the man he’s chasing turns left rather than going straight, and for Kai, who was distracted, it’s too late to turn. He loses sight of the bounty head. “Fucking shit.”

“Good job, you idiot,” says the transmitter, not completely displeased. “There goes our chicken.”

“I can catch him,” Kai huffs, speeding through the streets in a tight zigzag as he searches for his criminal. “If you stop talking to me every time I’m close to cornering him, maybe?”

“Very well. I’m turning this off,” is the reply that comes. “Hope you crash and burn.” And the transmission clicks to an end.

This time, Kai is hunting to survive, a small, petty head called Young Speedster. As petty as the guy supposedly is, for stealing shitty old monos to do God-knows-what with them, he surely didn’t get his name for nothing. The sunofabitch is quick on his heels. Kai groans, reeling his mono upwards, intending to do an aerial recognition of the area. It’ll cost him time, but it’d be foolish to continue running blindly like that.

“Frost swallowed him, it seems,” Kai mutters to himself, aware that Ravi is not listening anymore. “The worst death. My chicken, though. I need my chicken. THERE HE IS!!”

There he is, racing like a madman through S-XIII’s abandoned industrial district. The fucker isn’t even being chased anymore, but he still drives in full speed. Kai needs a tactic of some sorts to get him. Maybe perceive a pattern in the way he drives, in his direction and such?

In a few seconds, Kai already knows what to do. Through his incessant zigzagging, Young Speedster seems to be heading east, and the route will eventually lead him into a large boulevard. All Kai has to do is to make a smooth, slow curve in the opposite direction – to mislead his chase, and to give himself enough impulse – and shoot down in a diagonal, as fast as he can, aiming for the boulevard. He could flatten like pancake if he didn’t pay enough attention: he has to concentrate one hundred percent in his driving.

“Food,” Kai mutters to himself as he performs the curve backwards. “Survival…” How sad is that. “Go, me. Go!”

With that one cheer for himself, he pulls the accelerator all the way back. And there he goes.

“AAAAAAAHH!!” he screams, both as a battle cry and a reaction to the blades of cold wind hitting his face. From where he is, descending like a comet from the sky, he sees the frosted concrete getting closer and closer, the Young Speedster glancing up flabbergasted as he drives on, a person in the middle of the street.

Fffffffffffffffffvium, makes the air as Kai swerves up, avoiding the crash with the floor. Ssssssssssswaaaaah, makes Young Speedster’s mono as he makes a tight U-turn to escape. Shhhaboom!!, makes the body colliding with Kai’s mono just as he was about to follow up, and fffvvrack!!, makes the concrete as Kai’s mono flips around itself again, and again, and again, and Kai thinks, this is what the helmets were made for. Quite the epiphany.

The bounty head escapes. Kai will grieve that later; for now, he’s, for all things, glad to be alive as he slides out from underneath his totaled mono. It always looks uglier than it really was, he tries to comfort himself by thinking, eying the debris with melancholy. At least it’s his ship and not his neck. Putting both of his hands on the least damaged lateral, he counts to three, and flips the vehicle in one swift movement so to reach for the transmitter.

A scream leaves his lungs as he notices a person inside.

AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!, makes the scream, and it echoes in the empty streets in a ghastly way.

The body is tossed over the cockpit rather ungracefully, limp like a bag of water, eyes and mouth hanging open with little effort. To top it off, the body is dressed in a hospital gown. Kai wants out. Immediately. The transmitter cracks.

“That was quite the crash,” Ravi comments with a hint of mockery in his voice. “And I thought, for a minute, that you were a good pilot.”

“I hit someone,” Kai confesses, getting a little pale as he detects a fine line of blood trickling down from the corner of the body’s mouth. “Or someone hit me. Hard to tell. They’re bleeding.”

A pause. Kai knows he managed to shock the mockery out of Ravi’s body right now. He can’t bring himself to feel smug about it. “You hit someone?! How in the heavens?? There ain’t no one in S-XIII, Kai, specially at this hour.”

“Explain this, then,” Kai mumbles, snapping a picture of the body with the second uppermost button of his driving jacket. In a second, Ravi will be seeing what he sees. For now, he should probably… what…?

He kneels down on the concrete, almost at eye level with the possible corpse. Their eyes are red with blood now, thick dollops that cascade down his forehead. Kai swallows, his guts failing him for a second. “Huh… excuse me…?”

He doesn’t know why he’s talking with this obviously dead person. If they were alive, they’d have moved by now, right? And yet, he makes another attempt. He doesn’t want to touch but. He does. On the shoulder. “Excuse me… are you listening…?”

The person – dead or not – coughs. They cough, and, predictably, a lot of blood comes out. It splashes directly over Kai’s eyes. If Kai doesn’t scream, it’s out of sheer self-control. Blood everywhere. The person moves their eyes absentmindedly, as if taking their surroundings in, and, soon enough, their pupils lock down on Kai’s frozen, terrified face.

To drive Kai further into terror, they smile, a smile full of blood-covered teeth. “Hello.”

Kai’s self-control suffocates him.

 

 

Ravi is kind enough to give them – Kai, the mono, and the bleeding person – a lift back into the mothership, an old, but fairly functional thing named Kiev. The Kiev at times resembles a seagull, graceful but chunky, a bit crooked to the left side; that, of course, if seagulls were metallic and rust-colored, to conceal the bits where actual rust threatened to advance. Precarious, yes, but it works.

Not the same can be said about Kai’s mono at the time, Ravi notices as the transport elevator goes up, letting its occupiers in. Kai’s mono has a lot in common with the Kiev – its color, not quite rust but a faded burgundy, and its name, K-IV, despite this being pronounced ‘kay-four’ and not ‘kay-I-vee’ or anything similar – but, right now, it doesn’t look like it does. It doesn’t even look like a vehicle.

“Our baby…” Ravi laments.

“Ravi. Help. Person.” Kai reminds him, making the effort to carry said person on his back. Judging by Kai’s face, the load is quite heavy. Ravi helps, and, together, they lay the person down on the nearest couch. They have, fortunately, stopped bleeding.

“Not dead, by the looks of it,” Ravi comments, and Kai gives him the stank face, because it’s quite obvious, since the person is glancing around quite vividly. “Hello. Hey,” Ravi attracts the person’s attention by snapping his fingers in front of their eyes. “Hello. Name, age, home town, preferred pronouns. Please.”

The person blinks. They seem to be a little taken aback. Not their fault, really. “Uh, hello. I’m a he. I guess? My name is Lee Taemin.”

Ravi frowns, and Kai widens his eyes. They exchange a look. The hell is up with that name? “Where are you from, Lee Taemin?”

“Uh. I’m from. Down there?” Lee Taemin answers tentatively. This time, Kai frowns and Ravi widens his eyes as they exchange another look of disbelief.

“From Styx?” Ravi asks. Lee Taemin says nothing. “You don’t look like it.”

“Sorry,” Kai adds to Ravi’s sentence, elbowing his comrade on the ribs.

“Sorry,” Ravi ratifies. Lee Taemin seems not to mind. “So?”

He shrugs, toying with his necklace absentmindedly. “I guess I’m not from there, then,” he says, eyes unfocused. Kai is starting to think they should’ve checked for concussions first, asked questions later. “I woke up down there a few weeks ago. In a hospital. I don’t know my age, and I don’t remember where I’m from.”

Ravi glances at Kai. Kai, this time, does not glance back. He feels bad for Lee Taemin, covered in dry blood, dressed in hospital clothes, amnesiac. Clearly depressed. Quite depressing to look at, too.

“Did you run away from the hospital?” Ravi asks. Lee Taemin makes a face almost immediately.

“I did. It was terrible there. They wouldn’t even call me by my name,” at that, he holds up his necklace’s pendant, holding the inside out. “Even though it’s written right here!!”

Kai and Ravi lean forward to see. The pendant itself is simple, just a small medal with rounded corners, probably made of synthetic iron. Engraved on it, in a home-made or artisanal fashion, is the name ‘LEE TAEMIN’ all in caps. So much for thinking he could at least remember his own name…

“I see,” Ravi mutters, and Kai can almost hear his shipmate think. He’s trying to solve the puzzle, or the puzzles, or just reveling in confusion. Either way, he’s unavailable from then on. Kai takes over the conversation.

“So, Taemin. Taemin?” he starts, hesitant. Taemin nods, and he goes on. “Taemin. How do you feel right now?”

Oddly enough, the question throws Taemin off. He blinks rapidly, and Kai wonders what’s so strange about what he asked. “What do you mean?”

“Well—well, I kind of ran over you back there,” He blushes a little as he admits that. The shame! He, a seasoned pilot… “And you were bleeding. A lot. By the way, I should get you a damp cloth… or would you like to take a shower?”

Taemin perks up. “A shower!”

“I’m guessing you haven’t taken one in a while,” Kai comments, and immediately realizes what nonsense he just said. “Not because you stink or anything!! But because public installations rarely have showers in Styx. Or even in Pluto, actually, and Pluto is relatively nice.

“Yeah,” Taemin chuckles, looking at Kai like he pities him a little. Kai’s face is now the same color as his ship, somewhere between bright red and the natural dark brown of his skin. “They instructed me to use rubbing alcohol, and that’s it. Pretty terrible.”

“Styx sucks,” Kai agrees, this time just hoping it isn’t the guy’s actual home town “So, here, come with me. Or, wait, actually,” Kai turns around to Ravi, who, predictably, is still burning braincells over Taemin’s very existence. “Ravi!” Kai calls, and it’s like he just popped a cracker next to Ravi’s ear. He looks almost insulted. “Could you show Taemin where the shower room is, please?”

“Oh… oh, sure,” Ravi gets to his feet, still a bit stunned. “Clothes…”

“Imma look through mine,” Kai reassures him. Ravi nods, getting to work almost immediately, leading Taemin down the starboard’s stairs; so Kai also takes his leave, jumping over the larboard rails, heading for his chambers.

 

 

“Mr. Taemin!”

Kai doesn’t really know why he knocked. In his mind, at the moment, he justifies that it’s Taemin’s first time on the ship, and he might not know they have a drawer-in-drawer-out system. Though, the voice of reason tells him a bit too late, if he had just slipped the clothes in and left, there was a good chance Taemin would’ve understood anyway… “Mr. Taemin, I’m sending your clothes—”

The door opens. Kai jumps in mortification. “—in—I—your clothes—”

“Oh, thank you!” Taemin smiles, accepting the clothes from Kai’s hands. Unfortunate, because, now, Kai has nothing in his hands to hide his face with. “ _Your_ clothes, actually, right? Haha.”

“Haha…” Kai echoes, increasingly mortified. He doesn’t really feel comfortable with seeing strangers stark naked. He really doesn’t. “Uh, actually, I should’ve just used the drawer, but I wasn’t sure whether you’d see it, so…”

“The drawer?” Taemin’s eyes twinkle with curiosity, and Kai scolds himself, you stupid thing, why did you mention the drawer? What if he asks you to explain? “Ah, well, I should go back to the shower, I shouldn’t waste water. Tell me about it afterwards, okay?”

“Sure.” He manages to bite his tongue before he lets it slip that they repurpose the shower water. He doesn’t need to know. “Bye.”

“Bye.” And Taemin closes the door.

It takes Kai a couple of seconds for him to let out the breath trapped in his lungs. God, that was awkward. Just as he’s turning around to go back to the upper hall, he notices Ravi leaning over the rail, watching him from the deck with a shit-eating grin as big as Jupiter.

“What,” Kai means to snarl, but merely mutters the word as he climbs up the starboard stairs.

“Your face,” Ravi giggles, and puts his fingers on his eyelids, forcefully widening his eyes. “Oh God. I can see forever.”

Kai attempts to hit him with a tornado kick but Ravi ducks in the last minute, cackling and shouting, “Know your folklore, Martian!”

“I’m not talking to you right now,” Kai attempts a low kick now, but Ravi jumps, serving him a roundhouse kick that Kai just barely avoids. The fucker. Kai breathes in, and, mustering all the strength he has, he twists Ravi’s leg, sending him to the ground. “There! Eat the gravity!”

“I’m immune to gravity!” Somehow, Ravi avoided face-planting the floor by falling on his palms, and he’s now pushing his body up, almost throwing Kai off-balance. “Callisto pride!”

“Mars counter-attacks!!” Kai gives up class and tackles him.

Usually, when those two start wrestling and spurting out nonsense, they only stop when both of them are tired to the bone, which, considering their physical conditions, takes quite a long while. This time, however, just as Kai got Ravi in an arm lock the same time Ravi got his legs around Kai’s neck, an interruption appeared – Taemin had finished his shower, and the hiss of the shower room door opening always caused a startle.

The scene freezes. Kai and Ravi in a knot on the floor; Taemin, now clean and dressed in actual clothes, watching a little dumbfounded; the TV beeping timidly, warning everyone that _Jack ‘n’ Jill’s Bounty News_ would start in two minutes; the refrigerator snoring a little. It’s a bit ridiculous. Kai and Ravi de-tangle properly, standing side to side as if nothing had happened.

“Would you like to eat with us, Mr. Taemin?” Kai offers as Ravi tends the TV. “We don’t have much, but…”

“Sure! Thank you! To tell you the truth, I’m starving,” Taemin confesses, putting a hand on his stomach. The bloodied hospital robe dangles from Taemin’s left hand. “Do you mind if I stay over? Is that imposing or something? I don’t really know.”

“Of course not,” no one deserves being stranded in Styx, Kai thinks. He turns to Ravi. “Ravi, dinner…”

“I know, I know. Just a second,” Ravi answers without looking at him, too focused on making the TV work. “And there we go,” he mutters victoriously as the screen lights up, showing the bright colored commercials that antecede _Jack ‘n’ Jill_. “I guess we’re having onion soup tonight. Are you allergic to anything, Taemin?”

“Uh…” Taemin thinks hard about the answer. Kai watches. “Not that I can recall…?”

Ravi makes a face. “Right. Sorry. Well, if you do, I guess I can patch you up. I’m a doctor, you see,” he can’t help but put on airs when he says that. Kai snorts. “Though, I guess that, if you survived being run over by this human blunder, you might not need me, like, ever.”

“Who’s the human blunder!!” Kai yells in outrage, and charges. Wrestling is inevitable. They’re performing serious attempts at throttling each other when they hear Taemin clear his throat, and it’s like a spell has been broken; they realize they have a guest, and reassume proper posture immediately.

“Well, I just realized,” Taemin starts as both of them are straightening their clothes. “You guys know my name, but… I don’t know yours…”

!!!!! He’s right. He’s completely right. What a faux pass, thinks Kai as the TV chirps a whistle-band version of Oh Susanna. He nudges Ravi for him to start the self-introductions, since he is, officially, the captain.

“Right. God, sorry,” Ravi apologizes properly, like a real captain of a real ship would. “My name is Ravi. I’m from Callisto, and I’m the captain of this ship, officially speaking. As for my age, I think I’m about… nine hundred days old? Something around that.” He turns to Kai, a bit startled. “You’re the same as me, right?”

“Around that, right.” Kai makes a face. “Almost fifteen years old back home.”

“We’re old.” Ravi pats him on the back and turns back to Taemin. “This is Kai, our ship’s genius pilot or something. He’s from Mars.”

“Born and raised,” Kai says rather bitterly. “By the way, we’re both bounty hunters. Do… do you, like, know what that means or…?”

“People who hunt criminals for money?” Taemin takes a guess. Both Ravi and Kai give him a thumbs-up, and he celebrates a little, as if they all were taking part in a quiz show. “Pretty cool.”

“At times,” Ravi admits, hands busy with dinner. “Sometimes it’s just a job. By the way, Kai, the volume.”

Kai conjures the remote control as if magically and turns the volume up. _Jack ‘n’ Jill’s Bounty News_ is coming back after a commercial break.

“Bounty hunters from all over the universe, here we are to say…” says Jack, a buff Martian guy dressed as a cowboy. “Howdy! It’s time for another day of Jack ‘n’ Jill’s Bounty News! I’m Jack!”

“And I’m Jill!” Says, predictably, Jill, Jack’s tall, ginger, Europan cowgirl co-host. “This edition of our Bounty News brings all the info you rascals need to know about making money today!”

“Cut the crap,” Ravi complains to the TV.

“Sorry,” Kai turns to talk to Taemin, an apologetic half-smile on his lips. “This is probably really boring for you.”

“Oh, no! Not at all!” Taemin dismisses the possibility, seeming, indeed, quite absorbed into the show. “It looks like an interesting show. And it might be a good way for me to, you know,” he knocks on his own skull, making a sound with his mouth as to signalize it’s empty in there. Kai laughs a bit hesitantly.

“I guess it’s possible that you’re a bounty hunter who suffered from some kind of accident. Bad stuff happens to us sometimes,” Kai comments, and he feels like he just said something he shouldn’t when Taemin’s eyebrows twitch slightly in what seems to be horror. “Not to all of us, of course! I don’t know anyone who, like, died or anything. Do you, Ravi?”

“A couple times,” Ravi is clearly not paying attention. Kai mentally throws daggers at his shipmate’s back.

“Don’t mind him, he’s not even listening,” Kai is a bit relieved to see that Taemin is smiling at him. It makes him feel less like he’s blabbering, and more like he’s properly entertaining a guest. “But like, yeah. Anyway, what was the show talking about…?”

Jill is going over a fresh bounty announcement, the head being some mafia guy from Nereid who’s somehow involved with illegal meat transportation. Meat… how does meat taste, after all…?

“How much should we aim for?” Kai asks Ravi, browsing the new announcements for something that suits their needs.

Ravi cooks while thinks, thinks while cooks. The scent of onions and mushrooms starts to rise. “About two thousand? Five thousand would be ideal.”

Kai thinks Ravi expects too much from the world. “We might have to stick with the old news then, because…” he mutters, searching the fresh bounties for anything worth the trouble as Jack blabbers about legal bounties announced this week blah blah.

“Look,” Taemin speaks up unexpectedly, even startling Kai a bit. “That one looks good,” his finger is pointed at an exact section of the screen. Kai follows the sign.

“Oh!” he mutters, nodding. “Oh!!” he repeats as it dawns upon him. ”Ravi, how’s this? A gang of three named SIDD, one-thousand per member.”

“ _That_ SIDD? The dog people?” Ravi doesn’t even turn around, or steal a glance at the TV. Jill is now explaining the gang they’re talking about, ‘the vile genetic traffic agents SIDD, originally from the Kuiper belt…’. “Forget it. They were last seen in Ceres. Not worth the hassle.”

“In Ceres?!” Kai frowns as Jill repeats that exact same information: ‘These bad guys were last spotted in Ceres, between Mars and the Jovian system. Next, we have…’ Taemin looks fairly impressed. “How can you be sure your super-secret contacts are right this time? They _could’ve_ come all the way up here, couldn’t they?”

“They could, but, well, would they? Would _you_?” Ravi casually shoots him down, and turns off the oven. “Now wash your hands, children. Dinner is ready.”

 

 

After a frugal dinner, the three of them discuss over what head to hunt – or rather, Kai and Ravi discuss while Taemin watches avidly – going back and forth between the possibilities until they decide extracting revenge from Young Speedster, who couldn’t possibly have gone too far. Ravi makes a brief consultation with his Super-Secret Contacts while Kai and Taemin handle the dishes, and, at last, when Kai is starting to sweat over what conversation to start once they’re done, he resurfaces.

“I bear good news,” he announces, and Kai seriously doubts that. “Young Speedster isn’t in Styx anymore.”

Kai could celebrate, but he hesitates a bit. “Hooray…?”

“He’s in Charon! HA!” Ravi grins, and, when Kai doesn’t react properly, he kicks him on the shins. “Laugh! You won’t have to go back to Styx!”

“Fuck you,” Kai tries to kick him back, but narrowly misses. “I guess you’re right, though. At least Charon has people.”

“And it doesn’t look like a military base all over,” Ravi adds. “Mr. Taemin, wanna watch our Kai in action? You could sit at the monitor with me. If he complains too much, you can shout insults at him. It’s awesome.”

Kai blushes a little in mortification, about to berate Ravi for treating a guest like that, when Taemin drops a shocker. “Uh, if possible,” he says. “I’d actually like to go with him.”

!

Ravi’s eyebrows go all the way up. “Oh?”

“I feel like it’s my fault that the guy slipped away the other time,” Taemin confesses, avoiding everyone’s eyes in a demure manner, and Kai is surprised that he even remembers Kai was hunting a head when they collided. “And I think I can help, possibly. I’ll just follow instructions. It’s been proved that I’m pretty sturdy.”

At that, neither Kai nor Ravi can help but laugh. “Indeed,” Ravi agrees, and Taemin chuckles silently at, possibly, himself. “Indeed, you’re right. Well, it’s up to the pilot over there.” When they turn around to face him, Kai feels like Ravi is silently mocking him over something. The thing is, what…? Or, what specifically…? “So?”

He doesn’t have any valid reasons to say no.

 

 

And so, to Charon they descend, Kai piloting Ravi’s mono, Taemin serving part-time as backrest since, like their name suggests, monos are built to carry one person and one person only. To travel like that feels a bit… uncomfortable. Kai can feel the exact firmness of Taemin’s chest, and that just doesn’t seem proper to him.

“So, considering that you and Mr. Ravi are from different planets,” is what Taemin breaks the ice with. “How did you meet?”

Kai smiles to himself. “Funny that you’re asking this right now. I was actually trying to steal this thing I’m driving.”

“What? Seriously!?” Taemin laughs, and so does Kai, nodding.

“Yeah. I was super poor. I don’t know if you have been to Mars, if you remember ever going there, but the whole planet is basically a giant slum.” Mars, fourth planet of the Solar System, currently the one habitable planet that’s the nearest to the Sun. Where the poor are the poorest and the rich have left the place to rot. “I stole stuff to survive, and Ravi was down there doing his business. So… yeah. I tried to steal this. I can’t believe I did it, nowadays. The hydraulic part of this thing is horrible.”

Taemin cackles, legitimately delighted at the story. His arms encircle Kai’s waist as Kai ducks the car down to lower their flight line, and there they stay, not tight enough to bother, but actually just solid enough to bother, maybe.

“How was it then? Did you hand it back to him?” Kai shakes his head. “Did he chase you?” Kai nods. “Oho. That must’ve been awesome.”

“He could drive way better than I could back in the day, I admit, and he had the better car,” the one that’s now sitting destroyed at the mothership. “I thought he was going to hand me to the police. Instead, he asked how much I was worth. Of course. Bounty hunters.”

“Were you worth much?”

“Nope. Not a dime. The actual reason why he kept me around is that I’d be more lucrative to him if I stayed. And because, don’t tell Ravi I told you this,” he adds in a secretive voice, “but he has a big gooey-soft heart.”

“Aw,” Taemin coos, and they cackle.

“I can hear you, you asshat!” Yells Ravi’s voice from the transmitter, almost causing Kai to have a cardiac arrest. Shit, he forgot that thing was on. “Stop smothering Mr. Taemin with sentimental stories from your past and start looking for the head. Did you enter Kumarbi already?”

“I did! I’m in the innermost level already. Any lower and I’ll land,” Kai retorts, eyes on the streets down under. Kumarbi looks almost cozy compared to S-XIII; the protective dome looks less like a cage, the city structure looks less like a military camp, and there’s actual people in it. It’s still terribly cold, but hey. “Mr. Taemin, now we’re gonna look for the criminal from up here. Keep your eyes attentive. People in this town are rarely in a rush, so, if you see anyone racing, you tell me. We’ll observe for a few minutes—”

“I think I see something?” Taemin interrupts, and Kai has to admit he’s a bit taken aback. “There,” Taemin points with his finger a spot near the outskirts of the town, and Kai can barely see a thing. “Is that it?”

No, seriously, Kai can’t see shit from that distance. He subtly directs the car nearer to where Taemin is indicating, nearer, nearer… “Shit!!” He pulls the accelerator. “That’s him. Ravi, I’m going down immediately!”

“Don’t destroy my car,” Ravi begs. “But yeah, go.”

“Hold on, Taemin,” is the last warning Kai gives before he lurches the car forward, shooting down at maximum speed.

Taemin doesn’t scream, which Kai is thankful for; it seems like his driving tends to elicit screams from people, all kinds of people in all kinds of places. Taemin does tighten his hold around Kai’s waist, though, and by now Kai could’ve probably have calculated an entire topographic map of Taemin’s torso if he could do any math. He can’t, so he just feels, flushing improbably as the car takes a commanded sharp turn to the left, and the actual chase starts.

Young Speedster drives a black mono, tatted with obnoxious stickers here and there, and his helmet is bright lime-green colored. Not exactly unmistakably unique, not for Kai who has seen this type of driver just about everywhere, but he had done the world a favor and customized his mono with the words ‘YOUNG SPEEDZTAR’ written in neon across the back. It makes the chase considerably easy, even if he _is_ absurdly fast, even if he _does_ have some great moves and almost throws Kai off by zigzagging his way down Kumarbi’s southeast-northeast boulevard. It makes Kai considerably angrier at him.

“This fucking show-off,” he curses as the head does pretty much a vertical curve left, forcing Kai to do the same to follow. Since the mono Kai’s driving is considerably heavier – and more packed with weapons, true enough – it’s way harder to… drive…

“Hey, Ravi,” Kai calls into the transmitter as the idea pops into his head. “Can I fire one of these things? How’s the calibration?”

Ravi hums thoughtfully. “They’re good to go, as far as I know. Don’t shoot to kill though, we don’t know if he’s worth anything dead.” He pauses. “Do you even know how to shoot?”

“It can’t be that hard,” Kai thinks out loud, eyeing the weaponry commands with nonchalance. He then halts to a stop, hovering next to a plain rooftop. “So,” he turns to Taemin. “I got a plan. Would you be up to helping me? I promise you won’t get shot.”

“I’m trusting you,” Taemin says mockingly as he hops off onto firm land. “Sure, I’ll help. What should I do?”

“You seem to have really good eyes, so observe him for me. There should be… here it is,” Kai pulls the extra transmitter out of the necessities box, and hands it over to Taemin. “Tell me about his moves through this thing. It’s on, you just have to talk to it. If there’s any emergencies…” Taemin seems not to be listening; he’s admiring the device all around. “You got it. I’m off.”

“I’ll do my best!” Taemin smiles brilliantly. Kai is pretty much induced to smile back; then, he coolly puts the helmet on, and takes off.

“What happened to you? I saw you staying still for a while,” Ravi questions, probably checking the GPS map. “I thought you had shot yourself in the face.”

“He was dropping me off,” Taemin communicates, and Kai smiles to himself for no apparent reason. “Okay, I don’t see him anywhere. Off to chase him in the direction he went last time.”

“Roger. I’ll take a shortcut,” Kai carelessly performs a U-turn, the mono tipping to the side a little when inertia catches up. “Let’s see if we can corner him.”

Kai’s plan is simple and clear in his mind: while Taemin constantly reports Young Speedster position to him, he’ll follow it through the shortcuts, gearing up the weapons. Then, when they intersect, he’ll fire a harpoon aimed at the bounty head’s mono’s refrigerating system, trusting that the car will be minimally decent and stop functioning once it detects a leakage. If the Speedster try to run away by foot, Kai trusts his own legs to run faster than his, and, even if they don’t, Taemin would be there to back him up. Foolproof plan.

Foolproof, really, once he finds out how to activate the harpoon…

“He’s heading towards a tall round building,” Taemin communicates, but soon amends, “Okay, he’s past tall round building. I’m sorry, he’s fast.”

“No problem,” Kai assures him.

“He’s trying to get to a larger street, I think. Wait, I’ll get closer.” A strange sound. Did Taemin just jump from the rooftop? “Wow. That went better than expected.” He totally just did jump from the rooftop. “I’m onto him. He got to the larger street. I’m following. Heading north.”

“Your north or my north?” Kai is following Taemin’s directions at the same time he browses the weaponry commands for something helpful.

“General north, Mr. Kai,” Taemin chuckles. Kai grins. “He just turned right, I’ll follow him.”

“I’ll get there in a sec,” Kai decides to improvise with the weaponry, and just speeds up.

He twirls around the tall round building – Kumarbi’s main school, where small children in learning robes watch Kai pass by with excited smiles and squeals – and, instead of following the next boulevard, he crosses it immediately, hovering over the traffic as he dips into a rightwards street.

“Taemin, where are you?” Kai shouts as he suffers from an adrenaline peak from going up and down so fast and not even holding the brakes.

“Onto him! Not literally, but he’s going northwest and I’m following closely,” Taemin too sounds a bit roused, but less hysterical and more focused. “He’ll be out in the opposing corner from when we first saw him in one minute and a half, go through the west passage and you’ll corner him.”

“O…kay…” How can Taemin give such perfect data from eye value only…? Well, he’ll have to trust it for now, and he pulls the accelerator. “Anything else?”

“Found other rushers. There’s a person chasing a truck nearby,” he says. “Not sure what to make of it.”

“Ignore. Kumarbi people are rarely in a rush, but not never,” Kai sure has no business with trucks there. And, if he did, he forgot about it the minute he spotted the familiar helmet. “I got him! Taemin, I saw him! If you’re near, clear out, Imma shoot!”

He doesn’t wait for confirmation from Taemin; he simply shoots whatever his hand touches. Funnily enough, it’s a harpoon. It pierces through the target’s headlights. “HA!!” he fires something else. This time, it’s a machine gun, and it pretty much destroys the back part of the head’s mono, possibly damaging the engine, permanently damaging the horrid paintjob. “EAT THAT!!”

“Kai, the truck—”

“I GOT HIM!!”

“The truck, Kai, clear out—”

“Forget the truck!!”

“CLEAR OUT KAI I’M SERIOUS”

The truck hits Young Speedster, whose mono is connected to Kai’s via harpoon. The truck is sent flying, the Speedster is sent flying, Kai is sent flying. The last thing he says before falling is a prayer: _please, God, if you’re there, forget about me, just save this car_. If he survives and the mono not, Ravi will murder him for sure.

He falls head-first on the concrete. Praised be helmets.

Perhaps in his way towards death, Kai hears barking. He also sees puppies, a million puppies running towards him. Ah, yes, he’s in heaven. “No!!” someone screams in the distance, and then punches and kicks, and the puppies run. Puppies…

“Kai,” a voice calls him. “Kai, can you listen to me? Mr. Kai?” Kai blinks. He’s seeing a little more clear now. Taemin? It’s Taemin. “Kai, are you okay? Did you break any bones?”

He blinks again. His eyes focus slowly; Taemin kneeling next to him… the Speedster’s black mono fallen a bit ahead of them… puppies… puppies!

“What’s going on?” he mutters as he sits up, feeling miraculously unharmed. He takes a look of the situation unfolding in front of his eyes, and, I assure, there’s a lot to take.

A bit to Kai’s left, there’s an overturned Sir Solomon’s Sweet Peas truck, spilling its contents everywhere, which are, curiously, not sweet peas, but hundreds and hundreds of dogs. Dogs everywhere. Dogs running, dogs walking, dogs pissing on walls, dogs licking Kai’s elbows. Actual dogs! Kai blinks again and sees Young Speedster fallen to the side, out cold and possibly dead, and an unrecognized blond person tying a guy up over the Speedster’s fallen mono.

“Hey!” Kai shouts, hastily getting to his feet as Taemin follows like a nurse. “Hey! You!” He’s a bit drowsy. He should check for concussions later. Possibly judging Kai well enough to stand by himself, Taemin goes check upon their bounty head. “Who are you? Did you run us over?”

The blond person looks up, and Kai’s blood freezes.

“Hey!” Greets the yet unnamed element, a slender, pale man clad in black riding overalls. He’s clearly pleased to have company. “Long time no see, huh! Lil’ Kai from Kiev! Boy, look at you in your riding gear,” With a kick, he sends the man he just tied up to the ground, and turns his head in Taemin’s direction. “And you are…?”

It happens in a second. The gun in Kai’s pocket flies to his hand, and it clicks, barrel pointed directly to the blond man’s head. It attracts their attention, the man’s and Taemin’s, and the latter looks significantly alarmed. “Taemin, back off. Don’t let him get too close,” Kai warns, eyes locked with his new target.

Thankfully, Taemin does as told immediately, carrying, for no apparent reason, three dogs in his arms. The man is now stranded between the fallen Speedster, the tied people at his feet, and a whole bunch of flipped vehicles. Kai didn’t even have time to check Ravi’s mono for injuries…

“Who’s that?” Taemin whispers urgently.

“No one we should be mixing with,” Kai whispers back, still holding his gun up. Then, to the man: “What is your business here?”

“Ooh, that’s one cold way to say hello,” the man feigns offense, kicking a pebble like a sulking child. “Even though we’ve known each other for a while now…”

The transmitter clicks. “Kai, what happened? You’ve stopped moving. Did you crash?” Kai curses under his breath as Ravi’s voice cuts through the conversation like a blade, and the blond man drops the act instantly, eyes lighting up.

“Ravi?” he calls, a wide, slightly malicious grin forming on his lips. “Ravi, it’s me! Ra~vi~!”

“… Kai… is that…?”

“Yes,” Kai doesn’t need him to finish. “Yes, it is.”

“…”

“Oi, Ravi! Greet me, will you? Did you forget about me?” The man yells in outraged, crossing his arms. It’s hard to tell if it’s an act or not. “Won’t you come down to see me? It’s not very ‘you’, being this cold!”

“Get the fuck out of there,” Ravi commands. “Shoot him, if necessary, grab the bounty, and get the fuck out of there.”

Kai doesn’t hesitate, and shoots.

“Taemin, grab the mono!” he yells in the chaos as he narrowly avoids the counterstrike – of course that fucker had a gun on him, of _course_ – and dives for the bounty head. Speedster is luckily light, but his position isn’t favorable, and, in an attempt to grab the body and run, Kai lowers his defense and gets kicked on the temple. Despite the helmet, his vision shakes.

“You made me do it,” the man taunts, throwing Young Speedster’s body over his shoulder like it’s nothing. “Now catch me if you can!”

“He got the head?” Ravi’s voice screams in the distance.

“The truck!” the epiphany dawns upon him. “Taemin, the truck—”

“It’s overturned!” Taemin’s voice is unexpectedly near.

“Then how???”

A blue chromed mono appears as if conjured; onto it, blond man loads the speedster, tied man, and other two tied men Kai had failed to see. Kai makes a run for his own car.

“Taemin, trace him if he runs,” Kai commands as he hops into the cockpit. “Imma ram into this bastard.”

“Kai, my fucking mono!!”

“He’s running away with our chicken!!!” Kai shouts incoherently into the transmitter, and speeds away.

He barely sees what happens next. He’s still a bit out of it, because of the collision from earlier, and a well-aimed kick on the head does much damaged when from a worthy opponent. All he sees is: hideous blue mono with bounty in it. Blue mono might be faster, but Kai is wilder. Kai closes into them. Kai tries to shoot but accidentally changes gear instead, which he quickly corrects. Cold wind. The bounty. Survival. Dogs? Kai races and races, thinks and thinks of a way as the distance between them only widens.

Suddenly, the blue mono coughs.

Kai, who knows what that means, laughs.

“The bastard is out of fuel!” He cheers into the transmitter rather maniacally. “He’s ours! Taemin, you can retreat, I got him!”

“Roger!” Taemin says, and a dog barks, apparently. Kai is hearing dogs everywhere.

The blue mono’s speed is decreasing, the structure shaking and loosing height as the engine coughs and spurts like an asthmatic lung. Kai snickers maliciously to himself and pulls the accelerator one last time, gaining speed over the enemy, closing down on him as soon as he has an advantage. The man has no choice but to pull the brakes, and the body of the Young Speedster hops in the air, falling flat onto Kai’s lap. Convenient.

Visibly upset, blond man hits the steering wheel in frustration. “Not fair!” he cries. “I ran out of fuel!”

“You stole our head!” Kai retorts.

“You tried to shoot me!” he throws back.

“You—you’re trouble!!” is the only thing Kai has to say in his defense. “You’re like, trouble, the human incarnation! Every time we meet you something bad happens!”

“Kai, stop talking to him,” Ravi instructs from the transmitter. “Get over here before he pulls funny shit on you.”

As a response to that, the man jumps out of his mono like a monkey, landing unceremoniously over Kai’s shoulders and pulling the transmitter to himself. “Ravi, how can you be so cold to me? After all our history together?!”

“ _Because_ of all our history together,” Ravi deadpans.

“I’m shocked! What are you going to do now? Leave me stranded here?” he could’ve passed for genuinely upset if he weren’t, at the moment, pulling Kai’s ears side to side just to annoy him. Kai tries frantically to get the man off his shoulders, but he got a tight thigh-lock around Kai’s neck. “Raviiii, you know I have no money!”

“Forget it,” Ravi is relentless.

“I’ll behave this time, I swear!” he says dramatically. “I’ll just take the fuel and go! You’ll never hear of me again!”

“Number one: as if!” Kai is glad to see his shipmate is no fool. “Number two: what makes you think that I’ll give you fuel?”

“The fact that I need it?” Grin. What an amazingly shameless person. Ravi bursts into laughter.

“No, Mr. Timoteo. The only way I’d let you into my ship would be under the following conditions: you give your mono’s keys to Kai,” Kai looks up and grins. Blond man Timoteo pouts. “And you hand your bounty over to us.”

No hint of jokes or insolence in Timoteo’s face now. He’s just pouting. “Not fair?”

“No deal.”

Timoteo sighs. “Okay, okay. You brute.”

Kai is still hearing dogs through the transmitter.

 

 

Balance of the hunt:

Four heads, total sum of five thousand woolongs; one splintered rib; one major headache; four scratches on Ravi’s precious mono, R-IV; three dogs; one bag of sweet peas; and one universally sought after gambler, swindler, and general white-collar criminal, worth thirty million woolongs (not to be acquired).

“Taemin, this is Timoteo,” Ravi introduces rather reluctantly as Timoteo himself stands besides him, smiling angelically. “He’s someone you shouldn’t really get acquainted with. We’re deeply sorry.”

“Nice to meet you, Taeminnie,” he extends a hand to greet Taemin, who’s less weary than he is fascinated, studying the gambler with wide eyes. “You have quite strong arms. Where are you from?”

“I’m amnesiac,” Taemin smiles, and it’s hard to tell whether Timoteo is taken aback by that or not. “You?”

“Jovian system in general. Made in Europa, born in Callisto, raised in Ganymede, the rest is history,” Timo winks. Kai is ninety-percent sure the reference flew right past Taemin with no effect at all. “Say, Taemin, are you currently single or…?”

A frying pan hits Timoteo on the head. It’s Ravi. “Watch it,” he warns.

Timoteo gasps. “Could it beeeee? Are you jealo-o-o-oous??” he pretty much pirouettes over to the ‘kitchen’, where Ravi is.

“Kai will bite your hand off,” Ravi adds.

“Hey!!” Kai objects, face brightly red, a dog in each arm.

Taemin seems to be completely abstracted from the conversation, glancing down to smile at the dogs that now pool around Kai like moving toys. He kneels down to add himself to that conglomerate, attracting Kai’s attention immediately as Ravi and Timoteo argue in the kitchen over something Kai can’t be bothered with.

“They’re so cute,” Taemin fawns, letting one of the dogs – the smallest one, still a puppy by the looks of it – climb onto his lap. For some reason, they’re all poodles. “Look, this one likes me!”

Kai clicks his tongue playfully. “He likes me more, of course. Don’t you, Jjanggu? You do, right?” Kai coos, scratching the puppy’s ear, squealing when his fingers get solemnly licked. “See! He loves me! You love papa, don’t you, Jjanggu?”

“You gave them names?” Taemin smiles, toying with Jjanggu’s legs as Kai turns his attention to a lighter-colored poodle, who had been biting his shirt, demanding attention.

“Yep. This one here is Jjangah. She’s the only female,” Kai communicates as he caresses Jjangah's curly fur. “And this big baby right here,” he points at his own lap, where a remarkably bigger, pudgier chocolate poodle lays, observing everything placidly. “Is Monggu. Say hi to Taemin, Monggu!”

Monggu turns stomach-up to allow for caressing. Kai and Taemin giggle. Then, Kai remembers something. “Hey, you,” most times, specially right after reencounters, he refuses to call Timoteo by his name. Being familiarized to it, Timoteo understands, and turns around. “Why were they with you?”

Timoteo shrugs. “Dunno. Well, I’m guessing it was those guys’ merch,” he signalizes the SIDD members, tied and gagged near the elevator, with a nod of his head. “Personally, I don’t get why someone would make ‘illegal dog trade’ into a business. It’s just…” he frowns a bit pitifully at the dogs, one of which is still spread on Kai’s lap like a furry portion of chocolate pudding. “… dogs.”

“They’re cute,” Kai defends immediately.

“There’s a rumor that says SIDD dealt genetically modified dogs,” Ravi interferes. “That’s why it was illegal and all. It doesn’t even come detailed in the bounty announcement though, because no one got to confirm that. But apparently their dogs are very intelligent.” Ravi directs a glance at dogs as well, mirroring Timoteo’s pity. Jjanggu is trying to eat Taemin’s hair. “… They _are_ cute, though.”

“Really cute.” Kai will approve of no bad things being said at his angels. “And we’re keeping them.”

 

 

Five thousand woolongs would usually be more than enough to buy them food for a trip around the solar system, and the Kiev survived on less most of the time, their income rarely surpassing two thousands and five hundred. The twist is that, now, there are five extra mouths to feed aboard, two human and three canine, and Ravi makes it clear how tight the budget is before going shopping for groceries.

“This is gonna buy us enough food and water, but no fuel for you,” he points at Timoteo, who glares in protest. “No toys for you,” he points at the three dogs, and Jjangah whines. “And you,” he points at Kai, who flinches, “you better work with what you have to fix your car.”

“Yessir,” Kai mutters obediently.

Ravi nods, eyes scanning each one of them, as if searching for evil intentions inside their souls. As he finds none, or, if he does, chooses not to comment upon them, he climbs onto the elevator. “Behave,” he says. And down he goes.

With Ravi out all day to shop, and Timoteo virtually stranded on the ship by the lack of a functioning vehicle to let him out, Kai decides he doesn’t have anything to worry about, and, after a couple of minutes entertaining Jjanggu with a screwdriver, he, too, takes the elevator, and goes fix his beloved mono.

K-IV’s situation could’ve been worse, Kai thinks as he studies it. The top looks pretty rough, but at least the metal is just squashed and a little bruised, no big tears or anything that would need a replacement. The cockpit windshield is shattered, but he can manage. He doesn’t even use it most of the time, since he mostly drives in cities. They’re all small fixable things, (even if they’re a _lot_ of small fixable things, Kai thinks with a sigh), so he gets to it before his willpower wanes.

There are no clocks in the ship, of course, apart from one solar clock up in the deck that Kai could not and would not read. When it comes about the technical part of sidereal navigation, like solar clocks, topographic estimation, gravitational directioning and what not, Kai has always been soundly ignorant, and didn’t feel like learning any of that while he still had Ravi to pilot for him. Knowing about tube tariffs and how to fix the outer structure of a ship was enough for him, for now. Was more than enough, really.

Anyway, the point is…? The point is that, since there are no clocks aboard that Kai can read, he doesn’t know for how long he stayed down there, disassembling the K-IV to check for damages in the inside. He only knows that he’s tired, so it’s been probably a while. When he’s about to be done with the disassembling, hands prying off the last plaque of metal from the mono’s back part, he hears a bark, and turns around immediately.

“Monggu!!” the dog excitedly runs towards him, his tongue peeking out, and Kai kneels down to receive him in a tight hug. Trailing behind comes Jjanggu, who paws Kai’s arm to be let into the hug, and Jjangah, followed by a smiling Taemin.

“Ooh, so you’ve been fixing it,” Taemin comments, eyeing the naked structure of Kai’s mono with curiosity. “It doesn’t look as bad as it did back then.”

“Well, it looks pretty bad right now, since the body was removed,” Kai jokes, laughing out loud when Taemin rolls his eyes at him. “But you’re right, actually. No visible damage inside. Once I fix the body it’ll be good to go,” he makes a face. “For a while.”

Taemin hums, sitting down next to where Kai is playing with the dogs. One thing Kai had failed to notice till now: Taemin has a water bottle in hands, and he’s offering it to him. “Here, you worked hard,” he says. “And you sweat a lot. Don’t dehydrate.”

Kai laughs, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his shirt as he accepts the water with a quiet ‘thank you’. He had failed to realize how thirsty he had been until Taemin showed up with the water, enviably clean in one of Kai’s own white t-shirts and cargo short-pants of unknown origin. Ravi’s? Kai drinks up, relishing on the relief water brings to his throat.

“Ah, good,” he sighs as he swallows the very last drop of liquid from the bottle. “Thanks, Taemin. I forgot to bring water with me.”

“As I thought you had,” Taemin points out, petting Jjangah as she dignifiedly looks up at Kai. “You seem like the type to forget this kind of thing.”

!!! Outrage! “Why?” Kai objects, petting as many poodles as his hands can reach. “What are you trying to say about me?”

“Nothing!” Taemin dismisses any possibilities of evil intentions with a hand gesture. “It was just intuition, I guess. What can I say,” he shrugs smugly. “I guess I got a pretty good brain, despite everything.”

Kai huffs. He does, though. Kai noticed it from when they were together in Charon; Taemin’s eyes and brain are exceptionally good, in the classic way at least. Kai wonders if he ever got to go to school. Kai himself hadn’t, evidently. “I guess you do,” Kai mutters, and, if the delay in answering bothers Taemin, it doesn’t show. “If you hadn’t, Timo could’ve had you the moment he talked to you. Remember? Down there.”

Taemin makes a face and nods. “I was a bit alarmed,” he confesses. “I didn’t even know you had a gun with you,” and he giggles, for some reason, which makes Kai giggle too. “And I would never had guessed Mr. Timoteo was dangerous until he was disemboweling me in some shady place.”

“He probably wouldn’t have disemboweled you,” Kai notes. “Scammed you? Yes. Used you for bribery? Possibly. Disemboweled you?” he shakes his head, remembering instances from the past when Timoteo had expressed his disgust for ‘dirty jobs’, despite doing nearly anything for money. “Though, he could’ve threatened to disembowel you if he thought it’d somehow make you give him money. The first time I met Timoteo, he had a gun against my head.”

Taemin’s chin drops. “Really?” Kai nods, reminiscing. “What was the situation?”

“Ravi was the situation. Apparently, they’ve known each other for a looooooong time,” Kai gossips. Taemin, too, listens closely as if it were some kind of spy talk. “He thought that he could squeeze something outta Ravi if he used me as a hostage.” Dramatic pause.

“And then?” Taemin urges him on.

“Ravi shot him on the shoulder,” he reveals, and both of them stop to laugh. Neither of them have the slightest idea of why that’s so funny. It simply is. “And then he brought him in to patch him up. You know, Ravi likes to rave about how he’ll kill Timo if he ever gets the chance, but it’s all talk. He always ends up bringing him in.”

“Aw,” Taemin coos, and Kai snickers, imagining Ravi’s face if he could listen to their conversation right now. “I heard from Mr. Timoteo that he and Ravi will get married one day.”

“Pffft.” Kai laughs even harder. He almost hits his head on Jjanggu’s when he laughs, but, this time, Taemin doesn’t really follow, so Kai feels obligated to sober up and explain. “Ravi getting married to anyone would be already hard to believe, honestly. But to Timoteo out of all people…”

“What? Aren’t they quite close, though?” Taemin seems to sincerely believe that’d be possible. Kai thinks it’d be impolite to laugh at him at this point, but Taemin is smiling too, so it’s all in good humor he guesses…? “I guess I just don’t understand marriage.”

“Well, your thoughts on marriage could be a hint to where you’re from, actually,” Kai says, feeling a bit smart for making that remark. When Taemin widens his eyes in curiosity, the feeling magnifies, and when Taemin makes a small ‘ooh’ sound, Kai enters cloud nine of smugness. “See, where I come from, people don’t think much of marriage, but, still, it’s a minimal requirement that the people involved at least like each other.”

“You think Ravi and Timoteo don’t like each other?” Taemin asks, and Kai laughs. “What! Just because they fight a lot? Then I should suppose you and Ravi don’t like each other either!”

“It’s different, Taemin. It just is.” Then, Kai makes a face. “Though… you’re right, I guess. Ravi and I don’t like each other. At all.” Taemin bursts into a violent fit of laughter.

“Right,” he says between hiccups of laughter. “The only people in this ship who like each other are you and me.”

“Right,” Kai can’t help but smile when he sees Taemin laugh. It’s not a particularly pretty sound, or pretty sight for all that matters, but it justs… oozes enjoyment, in a way. “That’s the only marriage happening aboard. You and me. And the poodles.”

“Ooh. Bold proposal you made right there, Mr. Kai,” Taemin taunts, a bit coquettishly, and Kai is starting to realize he might have said something very embarrassing. “I say yes. We’ll have to ask the poodles directly, though.”

It gets even worse when Kai doesn’t have a joke to follow up with. His precipitated descent into embarrassment served no purpose but to make the situation worse for himself; Taemin stills at his lack of response, and it feels like even the dogs are staring at him, waiting for him to say something that signalizes his real intentions. His face is scorching hot.

“What do people think of marriage where Ravi was raised?” Taemin asks nonchalantly, and he’s so unfazed by what just happened that Kai feels… strangely drained of energy. Why is he feeling like this? Why is this happening to him?

“Dunno,” he mutters, distractedly playing with Monggu, immersed in incoherent thoughts. “Never asked.”

A long, horribly uncomfortable silence.

Kai feels like shit for ruining the moment. They were having such a good time, gossiping and laughing and then he just. What did he even do? Weirded out. Glitched. He doesn’t even know—

“Ah, say something,” Taemin literally punches him on the shoulder, quite hard even. A sting of pain makes itself felt, curiously, in Kai’s hurt rib. “Why did you get so quiet!?”

“Sorry! I don’t know,” Kai thinks of taking revenge, but he just pushes Taemin shoulder instead, barely even applying force. “Say something, you. My brain is tired.”

“Okay. Do you have a dream? Like, a life goal?” Taemin asks, and the sudden question squeezes loud laughter out of Kai’s lungs. Taemin laughs too, feigning some outrage. “You’re laughing too much!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll answer,” Kai swats away the hand that Taemin, for some reason, was trying to smack over his face. “You know that bounties vary in price, right? I mean, you saw when we were watching _Jack ‘n’ Jill_.”

“Yeah,” Taemin nods, watching Kai intently. It’s a bit unnerving.

“Well, reasonably, there’s also a ranking of the most valuable bounty heads in the universe,” Kai explains, ascending to smugness heaven once again. Ah, how he loves feeling intelligent… “And there’s a number one in there. So. My dream is to capture the number one most valuable bounty head in the universe.”

“Ooh,” Taemin praises wordlessly. Kai’s head might burst. “And what kind of person is that? Or is it a gang?”

“Curiously enough, it’s a cyborg,” lectures Kai. “It’s called the Eve of The Future. Not much official info on it, besides ‘serial number: MR01V’ and ‘very dangerous’.”

Taemin makes a face. “Mysterious.”

“Ravi says it’s an old governmental project from Titan that got shut down after civil protests,” technically, that knowledge isn’t his, it’s Ravi’s, but, regardless… “It’s worth fifty-seven trillion woolongs, adding up one million every Europan year. That’s a LOT of money. We’d never have to hunt again. The first thing I’m gonna do when I receive the money is to eat a nice meal,” he adds, a dreamy smile on his lips. “Meat... fish... whole chickens, and maybe fresh vegetables too...”

“Are you for real,” Taemin laughs, shaking his head. Kai is unfazed. “Fifty-seven trillion, huh…” He repeats as his laughter fades, seeming to be trying to wrap his mind around the amount of money. Kai nods vigorously, and decides that he knows what to say next.

“How about you?”

Taemin snaps out of his daze. “Huh?”

“Your dream,” explains Kai. “What is it?”

“Oh! I see,” Taemin smiles a bit timidly. “Hm, my dream… I don’t know if I have one? Or if I just don’t remember having one.”

“Ah,” Kai’s smile falls when he remembers. Shit. He shouldn’t have asked. “Sorry…”

“Don’t mind,” Taemin brushes it off. “If I can’t remember it, it wasn’t really important.” A small pause. He seems to be thinking. “I don’t know why, but I’d really like to see a flower field someday. Like, in real life.”

Kai nods, acknowledging it as a feat. “Like, a garden?”

“Not really? Like, gardens are usually artificial, right?” Kai is a little confused at that, but he nods. “So, I’d like to see a natural flower field. It doesn’t need to be big, or, like, the flowers don’t need to be pretty or anything. I just want to see it. And maybe spin till I fall in it and all,” Taemin grins at his own silliness, causing Kai to snicker a bit. Taemin is unfortunately cute. Specially when he’s with dogs and talking about flowers. Cute. “I don’t know why I want to do this. Ah, also, wouldn’t it be cool if I had a pet shelter?” Taemin raises Jjangah in the air as if to make his point clearer. “I could have a ship like this and travel through the universe to save stray pets from the streets.”

“That’d be cool!” Kai perks up at the idea. “Hey, maybe when I have the money, I could open it up with you. And Ravi. Ravi knows how to pilot a ship, and he doesn’t really hate dogs or cats or anything like that.”

“If you’re willing to have me,” Taemin jokes, but he’s obviously pleased. Kai is a bit scared by how wide he’s smiling, naturally, freely. “Ah, I should go back. Mr. Timoteo invited me for a match of chess a while ago. I told him I was just going to bring you the water and I’d be right back. It’s been… how long…?”

“Pretty long,” Kai agrees, playing with Monggu’s ears distractedly. “Too long to leave Timo unattended, I guess.”

“I guess,” Taemin agrees, chuckling, and, gently transferring Jjangah from his lap to the floor, he gets to his feet. “See you when you’re finished there, then. Also, I’m bringing the dogs with me.”

Kai gasps, a hand on his chest. “Are you divorcing me?!” The idiot. It wasn’t even funny.

Taemin laughed anyway. “We can get married again when you’re done fixing your car.”

“Okay then,” Kai humphs, giving up the dogs. “Bye, babies. Papa will see you all soon.”

And, without another word, Taemin leaves the garage, taking the dogs, the empty bottle, and a fraction of Kai’s heart with him.

 

 

They travel down to the Jovian system just for the heck of it. Ravi might say that he’ll shop for necessities, and Kai might say he’ll rekindle some old connections that might help with the business from then on, but truth to be told, they’re just doing it because they want to enjoy the luxury of having food, of not needing to hunt immediately and risk eating just onion soup every time they’re hungry. They go to Ganymede briefly, and Kai takes Taemin, Timo, and the dogs in a walk along the beaches of Damballah while Ravi cooks them special, native dinner. Kai gets a bit anxious at some moments during the walk, thinking Timoteo might try to pull one of his escape tricks on them, but he’s strangely docile the whole time, pensive, absorbed in thoughts. Kai lets him be.

After Ganymede, they visit Io, staying only long enough for Ravi to trade berry jam for fungi with local merchants, and soon they depart for Europa.

“Shouldn’t we visit Callisto first?” Timoteo jokes once they’re en route to Europa, toying with a butter knife while Ravi fixes the TV. “Our hometown. How romantic would it be?”

“Callisto? Romantic?” Ravi bursts in laughter. Even Timo himself can’t resist a sincere snicker; the only one probably not getting the joke is Taemin, and even he is smiling. “If you’re a fan of ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing at all’, I guess.”

So they skip Callisto, despite everything.

Europa is, by far, the nicest place Kai has ever, ever been to. If he didn’t know about how bullshit the government of the main cities is, he’d wish he had been born there. The rural part of Europa is perfect: not too cold, not too hot, breathable air, soil-y ground…

“This place is really pretty,” Taemin comments as he and Kai sit outside to see the sunset, eating fried snacks off a stick. The sky in Europa rarely has any clouds, but it’s always crowded with faint signs of the other moons, the asteroids, the comets… “I feel like I could live here.”

“I always feel that way,” Kai confesses, legs dangling from where he sits, on the currently inactive turbines of the Kiev. It’s a secret pleasure of Kai’s, to sit atop the ship when they land. Gives him an idyllic sense of home. “Maybe we could set up the shelter here before we take off. Our pet shelter, you know.”

“That’d be perfect!” Taemin exclaims, mouth full of onion and mushrooms. “Stop it, you’re getting me excited about this.”

Kai shrugs, smiling to himself for no reason. This is the best. Ah, this moment is seriously the best.

“Ka~i~ dar~ling~,” Timoteo ruins everything with one call, doing his annoying singsong talk thing as he emerges from the hatchway like a mole. “Ravi calls.”

Kai groans. “I’m going.”

“He says he reeeeally needs to talk to you,” Timo reinforces, pouting a little as if that’d put any emphasis to what he’s saying. He steals a side glance at Taemin, winking and waving friendly, and it riles Kai up for no reason at all. “Seriously, though. Ravi calls. Bye~” Down he goes.

Kai glances at Taemin, sighing, waiting for some kind of sympathy; he gets a smile, a pat on the back, a quick neck rub of encouragement. “I was thinking of walking the dogs a bit.”

“You do that,” Kai stretches, finishing up his snack in one bite, then jumping down to the actual deck hatchway, from where he and Taemin had come. “Want me to fetch them for you?”

“I’ll call them from the garage,” Taemin dismisses him. “Go before Ravi blames me for holding you back.”

Kai smiles faintly at his friend, and goes down the hatchway.

There’s a lot of things Kai has learned to expect when Ravi calls him and says it’s urgent. A mechanic system malfunction of some sort, usually hydraulic (Kai rarely messes with the electric stuff), or when he needs some help fixing something more complex, like the computer network, the security system, or worse: the refrigerator.

He has never come into the deck and found Ravi and Timoteo sitting side by side on the couch, like parents waiting for their child to come in so they can discuss serious matters. He has never seen that. He has never even dreamed of seeing that, even in the feverish nonsense part of his brain that thinks that he’ll really survive being a bounty hunter and set up an animal shelter with Taemin one day. He actually halts to a stop when he sees the scene awaiting him. One could practically hear Kai’s imaginary brakes screech.

“…” he hesitates.

“We need to talk,” Ravi says sternly, and it’s almost comic. Kai slowly makes his way to the couch across them, suspiciously vacant.

“What is this about?” Kai tries to joke. He laughs a forced laugh, turning to Timoteo. “What’s with the long face?”

Timoteo chuckles. “It’s nothing _that_ serious. Don’t fry your brain over it,” is what he says, and this actually brings Kai some comfort. “I mean, it’s serious, but it’s not bad. It’s about Taemin.”

The comfort is snatched from Kai’s grasp abruptly. Luckily, Ravi doesn’t give him a chance to talk. “Timoteo and I have our suspicions about his origin,” Ravi says, making the simultaneously spacey and concentrated face he puts on when he’s into what he’s talking. “I thought a lot about it. First, because of his name. How many people you know have double names?”

Kai thinks. He thinks and thinks. “It’s not that uncommon back home,” he justifies, even though the most he thinks about it, the furthest he is from thinking of someone. “Some people add a second name to theirs when they start artistic careers. It’s common.”

Ravi and Timo exchange a glance. Kai hates it. “Have you taken a closer look at his necklace?” It’s Timo who talks this time.

“Not really,” Kai is admittedly being defensive about this. “He showed me. It’s like, his name in the back, garnish in the front.”

“Ah, see. That’s the thing.” If Kai loves feeling smarter than others, he hates when others look down onto him. It’s natural. “That’s not garnish. That’s actually just another way to write his name. Well, it wouldn’t be a big deal if it was just some code or something,” Timo rolls his eyes. Code writing. Mafia thing, Kai notes. He should scold him for messing with the mafia later. “but that’s not it. I researched those characters, and I found out that that’s actually ancient Terrestrial writing.”

Kai blinks.

He—what? Did Timoteo just? Imply? Taemin might be??

“Of course, I’m not saying he’s from Earth,” Timo dismisses immediately. “Or rather,” he adds, producing a cell computer out of nothing and handing over to him. “I’m not saying he’s from what Earth is nowadays.”

There’s one word that pops out to Kai’s eyes immediately: _CRIOGENICS_. He doesn’t read much past that, even if the word _mummification_ penetrates his brain almost as if by force. He’s a bit lost. Or is he just willing to be lost? Forcing himself not to understand?

“That’s one theory,” Ravi quickly amends, seeing how Kai is physically rejecting the idea. “Though, I don’t think you’d like the other one very much either…”

“Either you like it or not, all of these are just theories. The cryogenic mummification is the most probable,” Timoteo adds, and he and Ravi exchange another quick glance. Kai wants to mock them for it. You guys look like a real couple, he wants to say. It’s like you’re communicating telepathically or something. Stop it. Stop. “Another possibility is that he’s an artificial human.”

Kai frowns. “Which means…?”

“Tube human. Synthesized You know?” Kai doesn’t know. Timoteo is a bit exasperated. “Cloning, Kai. Clones. He could be a cloned restoration of someone deceased.”

“Oh…” Kai mutters, a bit numb. Why isn’t he processing this…? Why is it bothering him…?

“In a way or other, it all traces back to Earth.” Ravi is the one who’s thinking the most about this. Kai can tell. Of course he would; Ravi has always had a lifelong fascination with Earth, its rise and fall as the crib of humanity. “Our next step should be, of course, asking him if he’s interested in—”

“No, wait. Wait a minute,” Kai interrupts them, slamming the cell computer onto the couch. Ravi is a bit startled, but Timo is unfazed, as if he had been waiting for that reaction. How ironic. “Do you really think he’d like to know his past if he’s really—like—cryogenic and stuff?? Like, hello, you were born a million years ago, someone froze you and all your loved ones are dead.”

“Calm down, you,” Timoteo scolds him. The nerve! Kai glares at him. “No one here is that dumb, you know. Well, except for you. Don’t you go around thinking you can scold us on shit like this just because you’re smitten.”

For a second, Kai considers punching Timoteo, burning with humiliation and fury. He almost does, really – his fist is tight, tense and ready to break the swindler’s nose. Eventually, though, he decides to hold it back for now; it’s not the right moment. Besides, it might pain him to admit it, but he’s right. He’s right.

“It’s true that no one wants to hear that kind of news,” Ravi says, trying to make peace between the other two. “But I doubt Taemin would like to live as an amnesiac for the rest of his life, Kai. No one wants to be past-less. Having a history, even a bad one, is what differentiates humans from robots, didn’t you say this once?” Kai is shrinking under Ravi’s stare. He’s not even trying to, but he’s hitting Kai where it hurts. “You, Kai. If you lost your memory, would you rather remember your past as it is, or live an entire life without knowing who you are and where you came from?”

Kai doesn’t answer.

He’s silent during the rest of the conversation, and, when they instruct him about the next steps to take, he quietly agrees on being the one to do it.

 

 

They spend quite a while decked in Europa. Kai spends all the time he can outside, for countless reasons; because he’s seen enough of the inside of the ship already, because he likes Europa… because he doesn’t like being around Ravi and Timoteo these days… countless reasons, indeed.

“There you are!” calls a voice from the distance. Kai sits up when he hears the sound, the grass softly rustling under his back. It’s, predictably, Taemin. “What are you doing sleeping there? Whatever you’re doing, can I join? Seems fun.”

Kai laughs. “Sure. I’m watching the sky. Really nice view.”

“Ohoo,” Taemin plops by Kai’s side with ease, his pale forearms brushing against Kai’s own tanned ones when he lies down. “Fixing cars, watching the sky, petting dogs. I officially love your hobbies.” Kai laughs again. He feels Taemin’s eyes on his profile, studying him, and feels horribly naked under the distant sun. “What are you thinking about?”

“Hm,” Kai hums, turning his head a little, just a little, to meet Taemin’s eyes. He wishes he could stay like, that, just looking at him. Just maintaining eye contact and not saying anything. Is that weird? The cell computer weighs down his pocket. “Stuff,” he says simply, shrugging, smiling a bit dazedly. “And you?”

“Nothing at all,” Taemin widens his eyes, as if delivering shocking news. Kai cackles. “No, seriously. I’m bored. The babies are sleeping.” He’s talking about the dogs. “Entertain me.”

This is his chance. This is a chance granted by the Gods, even. It has to be now. “Look at this, then,” Kai pulls the cellcomp out of his pocket, turning the screen on with a swift gesture. “How into history are you?”

Taemin shrugs. “As much as an amnesiac can be, I guess.”

“Do you know about Earth?” Kai asks nonchalantly, browsing the media files for the pictures he saved specially for this opportunity. “Like, its history and all.”

“Not all of it, but I know that it was where humans lived in the past,” Taemin confesses, searching his brain for more info. Kai is unreasonably smothered by affection. “And that a solar explosion destroyed pretty much everything there a while ago.”

“A ‘while’ being about over two thousand years ago, yeah,” Kai giggles, fullsizing the first picture. He’s ready. “Documents of life on Earth are awesome. They have so many super detailed pictures.” Taking a mental deep breath, he hands the cellcomp over to Taemin. “Take a look.”

That’s Timo’s plan. If Taemin feels anything, like nostalgia, or a sense of attachment, towards one of those pictures – specifically picked because each one of them represents an area of old Earth – that could be a sign, or a hint toward his origins. That’d signalize where to go next. Kai is honestly nervous.

“Oooh, pretty,” Taemin comments vaguely while admiring the castles, the temples, the oceans, the streets… tall buildings that look like Europa’s own, statues that remind Kai of his hometown, ruins like Callisto's, Gardens like Triton’s. How strange is it that each colony, each planet and satellite and town and house and pebble, is merely a refraction of what once had been Earth?

“Kai, look at this,” Taemin nudges his shoulder ecstatically, and Kai’s stomach drops with dread. What does he dread, after all? “Look at this. Isn’t it beautiful?” It also happens to be Kai’s favorite picture out of the bunch: a lone red gate, just like the ones in the streets of Mars, standing alone in the vast, blue ocean. He slides his finger over the screen, going to the next picture. “Oh my God, are those lockets?”

“There’s a legend about this tower,” Kai explains, finger pointing at the tower in the picture, but eyes sliding to look at Taemin. “They said that, if a couple wrote their names on a locket and closed it around the tower, they’d be together forever.”

“Ooh,” Taemin nods a bit ambiguously. “That’s a bit dangerous, if you think well.” A pause. Both of them burst into laughter.

When Taemin goes back to the ship, after he reviews all the pictures, Kai asks him to take the cellcomp inside. Taemin does it, and, with him, he takes another piece of Kai’s heart.

 

 

Timo has the cellcomp in one hand, a laptop computer on the table in front of him, and a regular tablet slightly to the left, where his free hand flies to from times to times to quickly scribble something. All of those are Ravi’s gadgets, Kai notices now that he can take a good look at them. He might have misjudged what Ravi and Timoteo’s relationship really is like.

“Northeast,” Timo mutters from times to times. “Latitude… no, not this one…”

“Isn’t he almost nice when he’s this quiet?” Ravi whispers to Kai, passing him a wrench for him to hold. He’s helping Ravi to fix the shower room door, which has been misbehaving for some days now, but his mind is elsewhere. “Makes you think you could stand living another day with him.”

Kai scoffs. “You say this, but he always finds a way in,” Kai whispers back, playing with the wrench as Ravi clips cables into place. “Every time we meet him, he ends up aboard with us.”

“What can I say,” Ravi shrugs. “He’s persuasive.”

Kai makes a face, stealing another glance at Timo’s curved figure, completely immersed in his own thoughts. “He’s smart,” Kai remarks, frowning to himself. “How did he get so indebted then?”

“He’s smart, but he’s an idiot. He might know that what he’s doing is ridiculous, but he chooses not to stop,” Ravi shakes his head, turning around to steal a glance at the swindler. “He likes gambling. So he gambles. The rest is just consequence.”

That answer puts Kai off a little bit. Because of it, he hits Ravi with the wrench, hard. “Hey!!” Ravi turns around to hit him back.

“Disgusting! Why do you talk like this about him! I don’t want you and Timo to marry!” Kai yells rather childishly as they exchange blows of something that’s between punching and slapping.

“You’re one to say! With you and Taemin acting like y’all married with children!” Ravi retorts, and hits Kai on the nipple. Outraged, Kai hits him on the belly. Wrestling is inevitable.

“You’re gross!”

“ _You’re_ gross!!”

“Quiet, you two,” Timo hisses when they’re at the peak of their fighting, Kai pulling Ravi’s hair while Ravi tries to throttle him. They freeze in place, turning around to find Timo giving them the coldest stank face in history. “I’ll charge you one hundred woolong per second of noise from now on.”

Kai and Ravi cancel the wrestling. No sound is made for the rest of however long lasts Timo’s research.

At last, after what felt like three full round trips around Saturn, Timoteo gets to his feet, jumps over the starboard rails, and lands right where Ravi and Kai are sitting.

“!!!” Ravi jumps up in startle. “Watch it! My toolbox!”

“So, this,” he pays Ravi no mind. “All of the pictures Taemin felt the most attached to are from this specific area of the planet,” the cellcomp shows a satellite image of the Earth, over which Timo had scribbled a red circle signalizing said area. “The upper part is submerged, but we might find terrain to land around the lower part. Unless this ship is amphibious. Is it?”

“I wouldn’t trust it,” Ravi warns.

“So no,” Timo accepts the warning. “We should plan landing at this point, then.” Kai has no idea of what Timoteo is trying to say, all he sees is random numbers. However, since Ravi seems to understand, he shuts up and pretends he does too. “It ought to have something still standing there. I’ve read that this area was built to stand through volcanic activity, so we’ll find something, at least.”

Ravi nods, taking the cellcomp into his own hands to take a look at the details. Timo and Kai; they can make all the kinds of plans of visiting Earth, but, obviously, without Ravi’s consent, they can’t go anywhere. Kai can’t pilot a ship for his life. Timo has a funny story about one big ship, one bag of scorpions, and a round trip to Haumea to tell someday.

Then, after he finishes analyzing everything, Ravi turns to Timoteo with amazed eyes. “Good job, you.”

Timoteo grins, sliding an arm over the captain’s shoulders. “Right? Have you fallen for me yet?”

“You guys,” Kai whines, pretending to throw a wrench at them, and it’s quite telling that Ravi flinches but Timo doesn’t.

They sit together in silence for a while, as if trying to digest the new information and its impact in each one of their lives. Kai, himself, thinks of Taemin, friendly talk and distracted smiles and the recurrent nonchalant references to his own condition. All of which, he realizes now, could’ve just been a way for Taemin to cope. Kai feels selfish, and generally horrible.

“So?” Timo prompts Ravi, glancing up to him, the actual question implicit. _What do we do now? Where do we go?_

Ravi catches it, and nods solemnly. “We better start making the rounds,” he announces, getting up, and his crew members follow his lead. “The ship is gonna have to make it through the tube if we want to reach Earth anytime soon.”

 

 

When the intergalactic council announced the decision of installing tubes in strategic points along the solar system just about a thousand days in the past, it was met with general quietness. There was uproar in some sections of the universe – the scientific community, the most knowledgeable sidereal navigators, some religious groups, some merchants – but the general public met the news with no reaction, because no one knew what tubes were. No one was sure of what they were for.

“Tubes are interplanetary shortcuts basically,” Kai explains to Taemin as he works on Kiev’s rust spots, fixing them with plastic paste and then painting over them. “They cut the distance of certain trips to a half, sometimes even more. If it weren’t for the tubes, no one would be able to go past Neptune to do business.”

Taemin makes a small ‘ooh’ sound, watching distractedly as Kai clumsily maneuvers a brush around. Aluminum paint is a drag to work with... so clumpy... “Is it dangerous?”

Kai glances up to Taemin, eyebrows creased. “Not particularly. Why?”

“Well, everyone aboard is fixing stuff,” Taemin points out. “It’s all you guys have been doing for a long time now.”

Kai digests the thought, nodding vaguely as it sinks in. “I get what you mean,” he diagnoses. “It’s kinda harsh on the ship, yeah, but what we really have to worry about is the traffic control. The council has their police all over the tube. The ship has to look on point.”

“Or they stop it from making the trip?” Kai shakes his head. “No? Then what?”

“They get aboard for inspection,” he says. “With Timo here, we can’t afford this. Worst case scenario is we getting jailed along with him for sheltering an outlaw.” Pause. Kai makes a face. “At least I’d get to go home.”

“Prison?” Taemin frowns.

“Mars,” Kai replies, and says nothing else.

It’s not an appropriate time to have emotional turmoils; Ravi wants them to wrap up until the next sunset, and there’s a lot of painting and polishing and changing and fixing to do, so there’s no time to glance down to the tools in his hands and meditate, but that’s exactly what Kai does from time to time. It’s usually when Taemin is not with him that the conflict surfaces. It’s usually when Taemin is with someone else that the conflict intensifies.

“Stop this,” he mutters to himself, glancing down to the polishing tool in hands. He’s there to clean the windshield of the piloting deck, but his mind is elsewhere, down in the main deck where Taemin and Ravi are teaching tricks to the dogs. “Look at yourself.” He can’t. The windshield can barely reflect a thing, hazily translucent instead of transparent, which had never been a problem before, since Ravi pilots mainly through calculus. Ravi. Ravi is down there with Taemin and the dogs. Kai wants to polish the insides of his own skull.

Someone downstairs is whistling the Martian pop song _Love, vice of mine_ and it makes him want to polish the insides of that person’s skull as well. That song is horrible. He knows every word to it.

“How’s up there?” Kai almost ascends when Ravi’s voice calls to him from unexpectedly near. He turns around to face the pilot a bit defensively, clutching the tool against his chest. Ravi looks at him, looks at the windshield, and creases his brows sadly. “Kai.”

“I’m almost done!!” Kai retorts, and immediately gets to work.

Not even near to being the right time for emotional turmoils, but that doesn’t stop him from having them.

Eventually, like all things, the preparations for the trip finally end. The Kiev looks spotless from the outside, as if it was brand new out of the garage, and they all compliment each other over a few rounds of berry wine.

“If you ever get the bad end of the stick in this hunting business,” Ravi tells Kai, patting his back affectionately, “you can make your money painting ships. That shit looks neat.”

“You’d still need me for the chemical mixes, though,” Timoteo adds, giving Kai a taunting grin.

“I’d rather learn them all by myself. From scratch, even,” Kai deadpans, and, out of the corner of his eye, he watches Taemin chuckle silently. It fills him with a sense of victory.

They drink it up for a while, until they find out that the dogs have somehow locked themselves into the shower room. The ensuing confusion and alarm sobers them up, and so they’re ready to go.

 

 

“What’s Earth like, nowadays?”

Somewhere along the while Kai has been friends with Taemin, he had become increasingly used to the way Taemin arrives at his side: silently, not making a sound before he opens his mouth and speaks. Now, when Kai’s watching the stars from the front deck and Taemin once again creeps towards him, he could’ve well been startled by the sudden pull back to reality, but he’s not: he just turns to Taemin with his eyebrows slightly raised.

“Why you ask?” is what Kai replies with.

“Uh, maybe because we’re going there,” Taemin rolls his eyes, laughing at Kai’s supposed stupidity. Kai shrugs. He hadn’t asked outright what the other planets were like when they were traveling back from Pluto, so... “You already told me what it was like before. Showed me, actually. I was just wondering what it’s like now.”

Kai hums, pensive. It makes sense, after all. Taemin’s amnesia doesn’t go far enough back for him to forget basic history, like the origin of humanity and how most modern inventions were created, but, when it comes to the universal diaspora of mankind, he draws a blank. It’s unpleasant to think about that. It’s unpleasant, because it’s another hint that Ravi and Timoteo’s hypothesis about Taemin’s origins might be right.

“All was going well in this little planet named Earth,” Kai starts to tell, making theatrical gestures towards the vastness of the galaxy they were traveling in. “Or not that well, depending on what historicist you decide to trust. Anyway, one day, a solar storm happened—do you know what solar storms are?”

“Yeah, go on,” Taemin urges.

“A solar storm happened. It caused a heat wave, and then a series of natural disaster happened, and, eventually, the Terrestrial population was pretty much wiped out.” Kai steals the dark, vast Universe a glance. If you travel, you put all your stakes on a mass of plastic and metal, hoping you won’t collide with anything, hoping it won’t have a breakdown somewhere too distant for you to get help. If you stay home, you put your stakes on the Universe itself, hoping such chaotic entity will let your planet live to see another day. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Life is a funny thing. “Nowadays, Earth is mostly ocean and wasteland. There isn’t much to see.”

“Oh.” Kai tries to analyze Taemin’s face when he hears that; is that frown one of disappointment? Confusion? Or an unnamed feeling that Kai couldn’t, and shouldn’t, try to analyze? “Why are we going there then?”

Kai blinks. “Uh...” Shit. What should he say now? He wasn’t ready for that. “Uh, I guess we’re just trying to prove me wrong? I mean, I’ve never been to Earth. Ravi has never been to Earth. I’m not sure about Timo,” he makes a face. “But like, yeah. We just wanna see it.”

Taemin chuckles. “Okay then.” The gaze he directs at the stars is charmingly soft. It’s like... Kai doesn’t really know what it’s like, but it makes his heart squirm in his chest. “You know, the stars remind me of you.”

It hits Kai like a hammer on his throat. All of his blood rush to his head, he feels like he’s floating outside in zero-G—why is he reacting like this? Even after he tries to swallow the feeling, his laughter comes out strangled. “Hahaha, what? Why? What are you saying?” His face is on fire.

“I don’t know why! And I don’t know why I said that,” Taemin hides his eyes with his hand, visibly embarrassed, but not even close to being as affected as Kai is. His embarrassment, though, is so sincere and so visible that it worsens Kai’s condition. “But yeah, they do. They just do.”

Kai is, rather unfortunately, in love.

 

 

“Congratulations, y’all. We made it through the tube.”

A small cheer is allowed to the crew. Not that any of them are in a particularly cheery mood – Kai and Timo know what comes after the tube, and Taemin can sense tension in the air – but they do applaud themselves on a job well done.

“Yes, we made it. And we’ll reach Earth in a few,” Ravi communicates them all through the intercom. “As soon as I figure out how the fuck to get through the garbage.”

Earth has the most impenetrable atmosphere of all planets, even worse than Ceres’, which is located dabsmackin in the middle of a literal asteroids belt. From afar, the abundant space debris almost looks like rings, like Saturn’s very own, but fainter and thinner; once you get closer, though, you notice it’s just trash. And it’s not a mere ring, either. It’s _everywhere_.

Over the intercom, they’ve been able to hear every sound Ravi mutters to himself, sensing the worry and confusion and slight exhaustion on the pilot’s voice, and they’re listening to it like Martian housewives following a reality show. Their hands are busy with different things – Timoteo and Taemin are playing trumph, Kai is petting the dogs – but all of their minds are focusing on the same thing. “This might be it. I might’ve sorted it out. Might have. It’s not gonna be pretty, but we’ll live. Get to the security deck and buckle up, all of you.”

Kai glances at the stairs that lead up to the security deck. They use it so seldom that the fridge is partially blocking the access to it. He sighs. “This way, guys,” he leads on, scooping up the dogs to go up. The trumph cards flutter noisily in Timo’s agitated hands.

From up there in the security deck, they can see Ravi piloting, sitting alone in a sea of wires, a confusion of keyboards, touchpads, and at least six screens, each of which showing a different graphic. Through the windshield, the view is breathtaking – Earth, the crib of mankind, whose beautiful blue color can still be spotted through the debris. Kai has been up there few times, and each of the times he had been amazed at what he saw, but the windshield was never this clean; the image had never been this clear, this palpable. He’s mesmerized.

“Oh, I’ve never been up here,” Timoteo comments lively, walking around, inspecting the seats, and Kai snaps out of it. “I suppose we should sit here, right?”

“Right! Right, take your sits,” Kai suddenly remembers he’s supposed to assist them, since he’s the oldest member of the crew. As Taemin chooses a sit nearby where Kai is standing, he turns around to help, kneeling on the arm rest to pull out the security belt. “Here, this should go here... and this lock... here...” Click, click, click, all the buckles make under Kai’s hands. “There it is. Good, good.”

“Thanks,” Taemin smiles, and Kai is suddenly aware that he’s sort of totally straddling him. Also, his face might be closer to Taemin’s than what’s considered strictly necessary. His body is acting on his intimate impulses at the least appropriate time. Kai is shamed.

“You’re welcome!” He squeaks as he quickly hops away from Taemin, ears flaming in embarrassment. “Now I—oh, Timo, here—”

Of course, Timoteo is already all set up. He’s locking the last buckle when Kai turns to him, and, upon seeing Kai’s shock, he grins maliciously. “I’m good,” he says, winking. Kai truly is shamed.

“Okay,” he mumbles. “Then—helmets...”

“Hurry the fuck up,” Ravi’s voice booms in the intercom, and it can also be heard acapella across the deck, which creates a strange echo. “We gotta go fast or I’ll have to calculate this all over again.”

Kai, in no position to contest the command, simply shouts “Sorry!” and does hurry the fuck up. In a snap, he’s putting Taemin’s helmet on for him, throwing Timo’s on his lap (a small revenge), and quickly getting himself buckled up and protected as well. When he’s done, uncomfortable leather straps across his torso and funky-smelling helmet on his head, he shouts. “Crew ready!”

“Alright then,” Ravi responds, and they can see him slide to the front on his stool, getting past the computers and now sitting at the actual piloting panel. “Just a note: it’s okay to vomit. Don’t hold it in, it can be worse for us all. Close your eyes to appease the nausea, and don’t leave your seats or even the deck under any circumstances.” A pause. Ravi’s hand is on the steering wheel. “Here we go.”

It’s only then that a thought dawns on Kai – fucking shit, the dogs. Where are the dogs? He’s pretty sure he just heard one of them run across the main deck. Fuck, what should he do? Should he go save them? Should he try to call them? He can’t just leave them—

And just as Kai is falling in despair, a symphony of clicking claws can be heard, and the dogs emerge from the stairs, running towards them with seriousness in each step. Monggu jumps, with certain difficulty, onto Kai’s lap, where Kai holds him tight with unimaginable relief. Turning around, he sees that Jjangah did the same with Taemin, whereas Jjanggu chose Timo as a seat. Timo shoots the dog a very puzzled look.

“And Ravi doesn’t think you’re smart,” Kai confides to Monggu, scratching his belly as the ship starts to shift down. “Aren’t you a smart doggie? So smart, my baby, so smart...”

The engines roar, the ship accelerates, and Kai shuts up, closing his eyes and waiting.

 

 

Landing is... rough. Kai likes to make fun of Ravi for his landings, always a little on the clumsy side no matter how much time goes by, but this is by far the worst one they’ve had since their last actual accident. By the time they’re safely on land, all of Kai’s bones hurt. He’s clearly not the only one.

“I bit my tongue,” Taemin comments, checking for blood.

“Helmets were a good idea,” Timo remarks, a bit green in the face. “A great idea, I’d say.”

“We’ve landed, guys! Y’all can go down now,” Ravi communicates through the intercom, slowly getting to his own feet and stretching his limbs. “Also, welcome to Earth! I’ll be down in a few and then we can go out. We should go in our cars, I’m not sure if the soil here is navigable.”

Taemin is confused. “What does he mean?” he asks Kai.

Kai is also confused. “I don’t know. What does he mean?” he asks Timoteo.

“It’s probably fine for about fifty meters, then it turns murky,” Timo answers, but anyone can tell he’s isn’t all that sure either. “Earth is eighty percent water, you know. At least half of it is ambiguous swamps.”

Kai, who has never seen a swamp in his life, is intimidated. Ravi chooses this moment to gallop down the stairs. “Are we taking the dogs? We should probably leave the dogs here.” Kai agrees.

“So, since my car is fuel-less,” Timoteo grins coquettishly, hopping over to where Ravi is standing. “I want to ride with my fiancé. I guess we’re all settled then?”

“This doesn’t suit me well,” Ravi deadpans, giving Timo the stankest face. “I insist that I must ride with Taemin, since my mono is the spacier.”

“Bullshit! Fallacy!” Kai chants rather viciously, refusing to acknowledge such an act of betrayal. “Yours is cluttered as fuck inside! And I drive the best, so Taemin should ride with me!”

“Last time we landed, you crashed,” Timo points out.

“In fact, you’ve had two crashes in the last two landings,” with friends like Ravi, one is in no need for enemies, Kai thinks.

“I strongly refuse!! So does Taemin! Right, Taemin?” Taemin looks dumbfounded as fuck in the sidelines.

The discussion goes on and on, until Kai and Ravi decide to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to take Taemin (“What is this? What is this rejection?” Timo whines, and no one pays him attention). Much to Kai’s chagrin, Ravi wins, and Timoteo complains about it the entire time, even after they’re out, the garage door closing behind their backs. Defeat is deeply buried into Kai’s fragilized heart, despite them all riding with their windshields down and close enough to chat in loud voices as they cruise.

“You know, this is not as bad as I thought it’d be,” Kai confesses at a certain moment, to whoever might be listening. When he thought of Earth, he thought of the dumpsters back in Mars, but larger, wetter, and smellier. Instead, Earth has deep blue oceans like Ganymede’s own, and the brilliance of the sunlight lazily reflects on the piles and piles of modern-times ruins. “It’s kind of nice.”

“It really is,” Ravi shouts back at him from his ship. It’s then when, upon glancing at Ravi’s ship to continue the conversation, Kai spots Taemin, sitting sideways across the back of Ravi’s mono, hair messy from the strong wind, and looking... distracted? … melancholic?

“It’s better than the pics make it looks, for sure,” Timo suddenly shouts from right behind Kai’s back, where he’s sitting cross-legged on the mono’s short tail. “It’s still pretty bad for what it used to be, but, well...”

No one replies to that, and the conversation drifts away in the wind. 

Kai can’t shrug off the feeling that there’s something wrong with Taemin. While the other two, and himself, are contemplating Earth with various degrees of curiosity and amazement, Taemin is oddly placid, as if he was—what? What is he feeling? He needs to talk to him. Maybe he can find out what it is, maybe he can help him to cheer up...

“Hey, you!” He shouts at Timo, who, knowing ‘you’ is no one else but himself, turns to listen. “Don’t you think you’ve sat there for long enough?”

Timo feigns surprise at him. “Oh, right. I forgot I was supposed to jump a few seconds ago. Dumb me.”

“Ravi, shouldn’t we switch? This isn’t fair!” Kai turns at his friend, making a begging face at him. 

Ravi frowns at him in outrage. “What’s this?! Are we supposed to take turns?”

“Taemin’s been with you for long enough already! Besides,” Kai grins quite snottily at him. “I just want to show him that I’m the best pilot.” 

“Oh? Very well then!” Ravi is understandably annoyed. Kai mentally asks for his forgiveness. He just needs to talk to Taemin... “Taemin, how’s that? Do you want to ride with this loser?”

Taemin shrugs slowly, at legitimate loss. Kai takes over. “Look, of course he does. He can ride with you again later. And then me again. And choose who he thinks is the best pilot.” Nice save, Kai. “Fly closer so he can get here.”

At that, Taemin wakes up. “Oh, I have to jump?”

“Yep.” Ravi says. “Still up to it?”

“Uh,” Taemin is hesitating. Kai, who’s already flying a little lower to help with the transition, shoots him a pleading glance. “Sure, I guess.”

“Oh, Kai, so sweet of you to worry about me,” Timo snarls from behind him, and, for a split second, Kai does actually feel bad, because shit, he totally forgot about him. “Don’t worry, I’m fine, thank you.” When he does check upon him, Timo is already hanging from the tail of Ravi’s mono, swinging upwards like a monkey and landing on his butt. Impressive. Had he missed by one millimeter, it would’ve been the end of Timoteo Wenkui Pomello Moonkyu Smitherson Kim, white collar criminal and the sixteenth most expensive bounty head in the universe. 

Well, back to Taemin. Despite his initial insecurity, the transition from one ship to another is smooth. Taemin jumps like an athlete, Kai thinks, or a cat. Even in the strong gravity of Earth, the strongest of all habitable planets, Taemin manages to land on Kai’s mono with little to no sound. Kai is so surprised he laughs.

“Nice jump,” he compliments as Taemin crawls forward to the cockpit, also giggling. As soon as he delivers Taemin, Ravi speeds away, already immersed in an argument about mono design and driving with Timoteo. “Ravi is weird-looking and uncool. I’m much cooler.”

“You guys... come on,” Taemin nudges him with his foot, and Kai inches forward, letting Taemin slip into the space between his back and the seat. Kai’s heart hammers against his rips almost painfully. Even though he had rode behind Ravi’s seat all this time... “Ravi was right about one thing, though.”

“What?” Kai widens his eyes.

“His mono is spacier,” Taemin says, staring at Kai as if expecting a very specific reaction. Kai contorts his face in great displeasure, and it seems to be what Taemin was expecting, as he laughs out loud and slaps Kai’s shoulder. “I’m kidding~.”

“I’m heartbroken,” Kai jokes, or does he joke?, he jokes. Their soft chuckles dissolve like tea powder in Earth’s yellow sunlight.

It’s harder to read Taemin with his back turned to him, Kai realizes. It’s harder – but not impossible. He feels something. Is that his imagination? He feels the faint way how Taemin’s fingers grasp his waist, how Taemin slumps, perhaps tiredly, against his back. Is that his imagination...? Or is Taemin really disappointed?

“What’s up?” Kai blurts out not very smoothly, but efficient as an approach to the subject. “You’re a little down, aren’t you? Are you feeling sick?”

A pause. A sigh, almost imperceptible, hadn’t Taemin’s chest been directly against Kai’s back, his metal necklace digging slightly between Kai’s shoulder blades.

“I’m not sick,” Taemin starts off by clarifying. “I’m just... sad, I guess. Looking at all this, after I saw the pictures...” another sigh, louder this time. “I don’t understand it myself.”

Kai’s brows crease sadly. He has a bad feeling about that. “I get it. It’s really a pity, I guess. This used to be a nice place.”

“I don’t feel so much for the cities and buildings, but...” Taemin’s arms tighten around Kai’s waist, and Kai’s chest tightens around his heart. Such an intimate hug. Such an intense feeling. “I... I don’t know why, but I thought it’d be a little more... fertile.”

It clicks in Kai’s head like a premonition. Ah, he thinks. Taemin is talking about flowers. 

The transmitter hisses and ticks out of the blue, and both of them jump in startle at the sudden sound. As soon as he recognizes the sound as the connection being stabilized, Kai’s startle is replaced with equal parts mortification and curiosity. If anyone speaks up just to mock their conversation from right now, Kai will take a knife to that person’s genitals.

“Not to alarm anyone,” it’s Ravi’s voice, and it’s not mocking; it’s a bit, well, alarmed. “But there are some cars flying above us. About five miles higher and two miles further north.” A pause. “It’s a flock of five. I have no idea what it’s going on.”

Kai thinks. He’s not sure it’s unusual to have flocks of monos flying around Earth – even though the planet is a wasteland, people still come to visit, and there’s a rumor that some even live here – but it sure gotta mean something that they’re so close. “What do they look like?” he asks finally. “Police? Hunters?”

“Can’t see. Let me find my glasses... oh, here they are.” Ravi is the only idiot Kai knows that calls binoculars ‘glasses’. He says it’s Callistonian slang, but Kai doubts it. “Uh, they sure look like police, but I have no idea from where. Does Earth have its own police?”

“Nope,” Timo is the one to answer, voice a bit distant and quiet but even more alarmed than Ravi. Comprehensibly so. “I looked into that. This could be Titan’s armed forces, judging from the coat of arms, but they have no business to do here—”

A bang. Something comes down flying, and Kai brakes so abruptly he hits his chest on the steering wheel. For a split of second, his heart stops beating.

“Okay, okay, they’re shooting,” Ravi’s voice booms through the intercom as three more bangs echo above them, and three more bullets barely avoid them. “Seek coverage. I repeat, seek coverage immediately!!”

Kai doesn’t need to be told twice.

He has driven fast, and he has driven fast enough to feel lethal even to himself, but he has never driven so fast as he is right now. The only way to avoid getting shot that he can think of is to be too fast and too unpredictable to aim at, so he cuts through the air in violent swerves, hearing the bullets as they zoom through him in multiple directions. IF ONLY I HAD A FUCKING WINDSHIELD, he violently thinks to himself as the wind makes his eyes insufferably dry.

“I can see a cave!!” Taemin screams directly against his ear, his arms now as tight as a safety belt around Kai’s chest. “Can you see it?!”

“HONESTLY I CAN’T SEE SHIT,” Kai yells over the howling wind, pretty much turning the ship upside down to avoid maintaining course. “WHERE?”

“Just go—left, NOW,” this time he does turn the ship upside down, and, if they don’t fall to meet the sweet embrace of Earth’s oceans that waltz right below them, it’s all thanks to centripetal force. “You’re almost there, down a tad, right, right, smooth to the right, shit, left, down down downdowndown UP UP—”

Thanks to his extensive experience as a pilot, Kai remembers to pull the brakes when landing, and it’s what stops them from sliding all the way through the cave. The landing sends a whole lot of dirt flying around the wings, and Kai barely has time to swerve in a U shape to avoid having the mono nose-diving into a small lake nearby.

All in all, a whole lot of things could’ve gone fatally wrong; yet, they’re still alive. Kai got a lot to say thanks for next time he goes home and visits his neighborhood’s shrine.

It’s half to his surprise that he finds Ravi and Timoteo inside as well, faces covered in dust and dirt and cold sweat. He carefully drives his mono some inches forward, to avoid any risks with the lake, and hops off. Taemin follows suit.

“The fuck was that,” he deadpans.

Ravi shrugs. He’s the one who’s the sweatiest. Judging from how bloodshot his eyes are, he didn’t have time to put goggles on either. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says. “Titan police? Shooting at us? On Earth?” As a stone cold guess pierces through both of them, Ravi and Kai turn to stare at Timoteo.

“What?” Timo is a little defensive.

“Just answer yes or no,” Ravi warns him. “Did you do funny stuff to Titan’s government?”

“Oh, so that’s the thing?” the laugh Timoteo lets out is bitter. “Sure then. If you think it’s me, then let it be me.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” Ravi growls. “Just say yes or—” 

“I haven’t dealt business in Titan specifically, as that place is depressing to even look at,” Timo interrupts him, a sour smile on his lips as he turns to Ravi’s mono and starts rummaging through its interior. “But who knows. Who knows if I didn’t do something, anything, to these people in particular. Who knows if someone who wants my head didn’t send them after me. I, sure enough, don’t.” His hands emerges with two pairs of goggles in them, one of which he shoves into Ravi’s chest. “But I guess you and Kai are right. I’m the most probable cause for this. So,” He shrugs, toying with the other pair distractedly. “I guess I should go.”

Kai raises his brows. “Go away?”

“Go distract them, you fool,” Timo snarls, throwing the goggles at Kai. They hit him on the head. “Take these, since you don’t have yours.”

Kai collects the goggles slowly, his brain a bit wary to process the information just given to him. “I do have mine,” he contests belatedly. “I just didn’t have time—”

“Then give those back,” Timo cuts him off, hand extended. Kai does as told, and the swindler throws them back into Ravi’s mono rather than putting them on. He then snatches the ignition keys from Ravi’s hands. “I’m stealing your car.”

Ravi is in a similar state as Kai, but he’s quick, and he puts on a fight. “The fuck? No you aren’t!!”

“It’s this or you fossilizing at the bottom of the sea here Earth,” Timoteo threatens, using his agility to climb up onto Ravi’s mono and start the engine. “You,” he points at Kai while his other hand pulls the windshield up. “Take Ravi and Taemin back to the ship, and get out of here before they catch a whiff of any of you. Got it?”

Kai is still a bit lethargic. “O... kay...?”

Timoteo stares at him for a long, still moment. Then, he laughs. “So fucking slow. Jesus.” And he starts the engine. And he flies off out of the cave, clouds of dust forming as he gains speed.

It finally sinks.

“Shit. We gotta go,” Kai pretty much hails Taemin and Ravi over to his ship, somehow fitting Taemin, who’s a tad more compact, hiding between the seat’s backrest and the cockpit’s own back. Ravi finds a place over the pedals. “Oh my god if we survive—” 

“Just GO ALREADY,” Ravi screams, and Kai starts the engine out of the startle. And there they go.

The noise of multiple shots is almost deafeningly close outside of the cave – that has to be multiple machine guns, it’s _impossible_ to be anything else – but it’s not close enough to completely hinder their escape, so Kai shoves his foot onto the rear accelerator and fly the fuck away of that madness. With one hand, he search for his goggles in the necessities box, but he needs to completely let go of the steering wheel to put them on.

“You’re going to get us killed!!” Ravi screams in outrage as he himself holds the wheel still so they won’t spiral downwards. Kai finishes his business with the goggles and regains control of the car.

“Sorry!” he retorts, and increases speed. 

As relatively free of danger as the rush back to the ship is, having the shooting and persecution been left behind momentarily, Kai just can’t feel at peace. First, because he has no idea of why a flock of armed force cars tried to kill them all in such a remote place. Second, because, at each shooting sound he hears in the distance, he remembers that Timoteo is fighting alone against five heavily armed men – and maybe even more, since it’s unlikely that they’ve come without a mothership. As much as Timo truly is dangerous company, and he might, after all, be the cause of all that, it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t sit well with him.

When they finally arrive at the Kiev, he helps Ravi to climb off, then he helps Taemin. And then, at last, he climbs back onto the car.

Ravi glares at him. “I know what you’re thinking—”

“And I know what _you_ ’re thinking,” Kai quickly interrupts, finding his pistol in the usual place. “But I just don’t think it’s fair, you know. I mean, after all the shit we went through with him, are we really going to let the police catch him? And not collect the money?” Kai shakes his head, rolling his eyes to signalize how absurd that is. “Besides, he can’t just die and leave that horrible thing aboard,” he signalizes Timoteo’s own mono, a chromed blue sports model, with his head. “It’s tainting our ship.”

Ravi, who was previously glaring at him with anger and dread, has cooled down since. Now, he has a faint half-smile on his lips. He understand what Kai means, even if it’s not put in words, or in gestures. After all, what can any of them say? Timoteo truly is persuasive.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Ravi warns him, dropping the smile. “I’m serious. In no hypothesis—”

The moment is smashed to pieces by Taemin, who pulls Kai’s arm with aggressiveness previously unseen from him. “Make room,” he deadpans.

Caught off-guard, Kai sputters. “I—Taemin, no, you—”

“Just the thought of you getting killed makes me sick,” Taemin declares, pretty much shoving himself back where he had been, crouching behind the seat. “If you die, I want to at least be able to do something about it. Do any of you have a spare gun?” He finishes off by asking, looking back and forth at the two of them as if he had never said anything more normal than that.

Ravi blinks several times before pulling his own pistol out of his pocket and handing it over to Taemin. “Perfect. Thank you,” Taemin says. 

By then, Kai’s face has flushed into an unattractive shade of burgundy, and he’s desperately trying to look away from absolutely everyone to hide it. Ravi shoots him a worried look before commenting, “I guess I’ll monitor y’all then...” and retreating to the deck. Your discretion is appreciated, Ravi, Kai thinks fervorouslyas his cheeks’ temperature starts at last going down from ‘on fire’ to a normal level.

He’s still in the process of recovering when Taemin taps him on the shoulder and urges him to go. “We have to catch up before the worst happens,” he says, and he’s right, so Kai starts the engine, clicks the garage door open, and flies off once again.

It’s only once they’re already in the air, once the wind is threatening to tear his hair off once again as he rushes to find the battlefield, that the thought hits Kai: he really might not make it back to the ship. He really might not ever see Ravi again, depending on how things go down with the police. And, what bugs him at the moment is – he might die without ever telling Taemin what he feels for him.

Not seeing Ravi again feels too unreal for him to be bothered, but not confessing... it’s disturbing. Taking his affection for Taemin to the grave feels, at the same time, very possible and wrong, leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. 

He has to say something.

Immediately.

He can’t risk missing this chance.

“Taemin,” his courage evades his body as soon as the words leave his mouth. Regret washes over him, cold and frightening.

“What?” Taemin is alarmed. Of course he is, Kai thinks to himself, horribly remorseful. Of course he is, considering the situation. He can’t just not say anything. “Kai, what is it? What happened?”

“No, nothing,” Kai dismisses immediately, his grip around the steering wheel unnecessarily tight. “I... uh,” gurgle gurgle, “I just. Really hope we don’t die!”

A pause. Then, a loud explosion of laughter right next to Kai’s ear, loud enough to cut through the wind and make him flinch. “Oh man, you scared me,” Taemin laughs and laughs more, and Kai wonders why on Earth (literally) he’s almost hurt by it.

Well, ‘almost’ because, at that very same moment, a bullet zooms through them, right above Kai’s ear.

“Fuck shit FUCK,” Kai swerves violently, spiraling away as a billion other bullets keep coming from the fucking nowhere, aimed specifically at them. “Fuck, Taemin, are you okay? Taemin!!”

“I’m good! Jesus, what was that??” Thank God, Kai thinks feverishly, thank all the gods actually. “Did we get there already? Where’s Timoteo?”

“They’re following us, they’re aiming at us,” Kai snarls as a machine gun roars right above them, and he catches a glance of a flock of monos just as he speeds up. “For some reason, they’re aiming directly at us, I have no idea of what’s fucking going on—”

A bullet to their right wing. Kai screams, looping to the side, and going down to mimic a fall. “MOTHERFUCKERS,” he curses loudly, taking a look at the wing to make sure his baby isn’t hurt. Nothing to fret about, he notices, but increase in precision from the shooters is alarming. “Fuck these people man, we gotta counter-attack. Don’t shoot yet, though, that pistol is low-range.”

“Up to fifty meters. I know.” A pause. “I don’t know _why_ I know this, but I know.”

“It doesn’t matter why. They think we crashed,” Kai explains as he brusquely guides the car back up, right behind a pile of debris. “Right now, at least. If they’re really the police, they’re gonna go down to check. Shoot them then. Got it?”

“Got it,” Taemin rogers the commands. They reduce speed, Kai looking up for any signs of aerial vigilance. Then, he hears engines. They’re coming. They’re coming. Kai waits...

That’s gotta be a fucking bazooka that hits them next.

“Fucking SHIT,” yes, once again, Kai curses in yells as the pile of debris explodes over them. Well, at least it shielded them for a while. “Shoot whoever you see, Taemin! NOW!”

They come into view soon – a dozen, two dozen of men clad in black, the gold coat of arms visible on their chest as they shoot incessantly at them. Kai uses the mono itself as a barricade, praying that the car will take it well as he shoots without aiming, just shoots, shoots, shoots. The noise is horrible, deafening. And where the fuck is Timoteo? Is he dead? Is he dead already? Kai shoots furiously.

“Taemin, how is it back there?” Kai asks during a refuge period. The machine guns spit fire above his head. “Hurt anywhere?”

“No. You?” Taemin breathes out. As Kai replies with a faint ‘no’, Taemin lets out a deep breath. “This is so scary.”

“It is.” Kai’s hands have been shaking all this time. “I’m gonna do a drive-by shooting. I’ll drive to run over them, and you shoot anyone still standing. Can you do that?”

“I have to,” Taemin says, voice oddly placid, and Kai feels horribly sorry for him. “Come on. Let’s do it.”

Kai loses no time. 

The mono gives out an ungodly screech as Kai roughly knees the accelerator, driving from under the main panel. This is gonna be his most dangerous stunt so far... possibly his last... he better go with everything he has.

“EAT SHIT,” he heroically screams as he barely controls his crazed vehicle towards the shooters. As it hits the first person, Kai realizes that he’s gonna have to pop up to drive, that he can’t drive from down there the entire time, so he says a quick prayer and sits up. “AAAAAAAAAARGH,” he yells savagely, hitting policeman after policeman in a grotesquely beautiful sequence.

Eventually, as he drives and shoots and shoots and drives without even protecting himself anymore, the inevitable happens; after he has ran over about half of the officers shooting at them, some of which even tried to escape rather frenziedly, one officers aims well enough to put a bullet on him. He doesn’t even notice it at first, he just notices the bastard aiming right at him and shooting and motherfucker!! And it’s only after the enemy is flying two meters in the air and Taemin is shooting him like a darts game target that the pain kicks in.

“Shit,” he mutters as he realizes what it probably is. “Shit,” he mutters a little louder as he brings a hand to the wound and feels blood flow through his fingers. “Shiiiit,” he moans in pain as his body communicates him that something’s wrong, and he shoots haphazardly at the policemen to try to appease it. In the distant blue sky of Earth, more cars are coming.

“Kai,” Taemin calls. Fucking shit. “Kai, how’s there? We got these,” a shot to finish off the last one. “But there’s more coming.”

Kai winces. His head feels light. “Kai?” Taemin calls again.

“I got shot,” Kai confesses. Both of his hands are on the wound, as if trying to manually close it, to hold the blood in, but it’s useless.

There’s a pause before Taemin’s reaction. And Taemin’s reaction is to jump over him, over the seat, landing on the hood with wide, wide eyes and white lips.

“Here. Here,” he pries Kai’s hands away from the wound, right below his ribs, on the soft part of his torso. “Let me see it. Oh, God,” Taemin’s voice quivers as he see it. Kai looks down to see too. Blood. A lot of blood. Who knew there was that much blood in his body... “Oh my God, this is bad.”

“It isn’t. We need to get Timo,” Kai insists, raising a bloody hand to Taemin’s face for a soft touch. Energy is leaving his body in waves and bouts. He sure hope this isn’t what dying feels like, because it’s a bit pathetic. “Timo can’t die. You can’t die...”

“ _You_ can’t die!!” Taemin screams at him, and it’s brief – it’s a brief hallucination, but, for a split second, Kai sees Taemin’s irises gleam white. He also sees the sky turn green, but that he knows to be a result of his faltering senses. Hahaha, what is he thinking? “You can’t die. And you won’t die. You won’t die.”

“But you—” Kai tries, but Taemin shuts him up by grabbing his chin. Not violently – intimately.

“I won’t die.” It’s more than a promise. It’s an affirmation. The universe is vast. Styx is cold. Taemin won’t die. After a pause, and some more of Kai’s hallucinations, Taemin scoffs. “It’d take them quite the effort to kill me off.”

They’re coming. Kai can see them coming, already near enough to shoot with their awful guns... blood, so much blood, and noise, so much noise... the very last thing Kai sees is Taemin standing up on the hood of the K-IV, a single pistol in his hand, and getting thoroughly executed by the machine guns, and Kai thinks, _what the fuck, Taemin, you fucking said you wouldn’t die_ — 

 

 

It feels like he has been inconscious for a lifetime.

Eerily enough, it could’ve easily been so.

It could. It really could, but, as Kai realizes once he opens his eyes and tastes moisture on his lips, he has not reincarnated. His hands, as he verifies when looking down, are still his own hands. So far, so good. His legs also look the same, at least from that distance and in the dark...

Kai blinks. He looks at the sky, eyes slowly focusing on Earth’s single, lonely moon, and then – the stars. The millions and millions of stars. The bright streaks of the milky way galaxy, the bigger, brighter planets, and the tiny, distant glows of other suns. It’s so breathtakingly beautiful – beautiful unlike the skies on anywhere else, unlike any night skies that Kai has seen in his entire life – that it takes him a while for him to think, _shit, for how long have I been out...?_

He hastily sits up, and almost falls back down when flares of pain invade his ribcage, forcing a scream out of him with how intense it was. He’s trying his best to breathe normally when a hand lands on his shoulder, and he knows, as if by way of a spell – it’s Taemin.

“Lie back down,” Taemin’s voice is gentle right beside his ear, soothing like a mother’s as he helps Kai to lower himself once again. He is, by now, half-aware of where he is; inside his own mono, lying on the seat, which has been leant back to almost horizontal position. Since he doesn’t feel the engine, he assumes the engine is off and the car is parked. Glancing around in the dark, he couldn’t possibly be more clueless as to where they are.

And Taemin...

“Taemin,” Kai calls, voice unexpectedly hoarse, throat unexpectedly rusty. “Taemin...”

“I’m here,” Taemin replies, and moves to sit by Kai’s side, holding Kai’s hand in his own, palms oddly rough... “I’m right here.” As Kai’s eyes grow used to the darkness, he starts seeing Taemin clearer and clearer, and a horrified scream gets lodged in his throat once he realizes what he’s seeing.

Taemin is covered, head to toe, in bullet wounds. His face is disfigured by them, his neck, his arms, his chest—they’re all over him. Some are brightly red and wet, still open but not dripping blood; some are covered in scabs, dark and hardened; and some are round and what, lightly pinkish at the center, but looking like... as if...

Kai stares for long enough that Taemin notices. When Taemin follows Kai’s glance, he smiles sadly. “It looks bad but it’s really not,” he says, fingers touching absentmindedly one of the open wounds, one on the right side of his chest. “The worst will heal in one hour and thirteen minutes. All wounds will be closed and out of risk of inflammation in two hours, more or less depending on how much I move. In twenty-four hours, the scars will be gone, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened to me.” He opens his arms, allowing Kai to see more wounds, clearer. “Isn’t technology amazing?”

Kai doesn’t understand. 

“You... but...” he can’t phrase the question at all. In all honestly, he doesn’t even know what he wants to ask. “I... humans don’t heal that fast, Taemin, you need to treat those... I mean, we need to treat those, I can help...”

He moves as if to try getting up, but Taemin stops him promptly, hands firm, and yet not forceful, on his shoulders. Is it just him? Or has Taemin’s smile gotten sadder?

“You answered your own question,” Taemin communicates, and Kai is even more confused, because what? What did he say?! 

“What?” Kai agonizes. He doesn’t like this. He feels like he’s missing some important information, and he doesn’t like it, at all. Taemin is silent now, eyes unfocused as he immerses in thought, and Kai just wants to yank him out of it for answers. “Taemin, what’s going on?”

It does seem to reach Taemin, even if faintly. Taemin is still looking away, but he seems to be more... present, one could say. He’s about to say something. Kai needs to wait now.

“Well,” Taemin starts off hesitantly. “I have good news, and bad news for you,” he turns to look into Kai’s eyes, and Kai is confused by the mix of sadness and humor he reads in Taemin’s expression. “Bad first?”

“Bad first,” Kai agrees.

“Okay, so, bad news,” Taemin sits, legs crossed, on the hood of Kai’s mono. Kai wishes he was sitting closer to him. He feels distant. “I’m not a human being. At all. I have never been one, not even when I was living like one, before I remembered my past.”

Kai blinks. He blinks once again, and then once again, slowly processing the information. “You... remembered your past...?”

“My memories came back not long ago, during the shooting,” Taemin declares, avoiding Kai’s eyes in order to gaze into the horizon. “So, yeah. I’m not human. But hey, the good news!” Taemin announces, reaching forward to squeeze Kai’s hand, still not looking at him. “I’m worth fifty-seven trillion woolongs. If you hand me over, you’ll never have to hunt again.”

??? Kai doesn’t understand. Taemin is worth a what? Hand him over? Fifty-seven trillion woolongs? What?

“What?” Kai vocalizes. “Taemin, I don’t understand. What’s going on? Why are you talking about—what?”

Taemin chuckles darkly, changing positions in order to straddle the car instead of sitting on it. It brings him closer, a little closer, but, emotionally, he seems more distant than ever.

“You don’t recognize me. I suppose they never put on pictures with the ad,” he comments with fake, fake nonchalance. “Let me introduce myself, then. I’m not Taemin. That’s not my name, nor has it ever been. My official serial number is MR10V.” Pause. “You understand what that means, right?”

The air stands still around Kai’s head. His breath stays still inside his throat. Pressure. Light-headness. Shock.

“The Eve of the Future,” he gasps, his vision swims, and the conversation has to be postponed.

 

 

Kai comes to his senses a good deal of salty water to his face later. Taemin does his best to reanimate him, talks him through it, as if Kai was about to die instead of just too shocked to function. He doesn’t properly pass out, either; his brain is actually racing as his body malfunctions, thinking and rethinking and processing and remembering and it barely makes sense to himself anymore.

“Be strong, Kai, stay with me. Stay with me, okay?” Taemin calls as he probably thinks that Kai is walking towards the light, when he’s actually thinking, what the fuck? I’ve been dreaming to meet you since I was a snotty teen and you’ve been actually living with me for the past several months?!, or something along these lines.

Kai had been very attached to the idea of seizing the Eve of the Future since the very beginning of his career as a hunter. Ravi, a snotty teen himself but with much more experience, schooled him on all things bounty-hunting, and, out of all things, Kai was the most fascinated by the ranking.

What happens if I catch the number one?, Kai had asked then. Ravi, in response, had shrugged.

You’ll get your money, he had said simply. And you get your ego check, he added a bit disdainfully when Kai’s fascination failed to wane. Aiming for the top has always been almost a hobby for Kai.

Imagine you his shock to discover that the number one bounty head in the universe, the one he has been pretty much lusting after for literal _years_ , is the same person as the cute amnesiac he had fallen in love with over the course of many spacial road trips and bland-tasting bowls of onion soup. 

This is not real, Kai concludes at last when Taemin is, once again, applying cold salt water to his face. None of this is real. He isn’t real either.

“Kai, please,” Taemin pleads in a small, desperate voice. Kai starts coming back from his confused reverie. “Please don’t die. If you die, I’ll never forgive myself. Never. Please—”

“I,” Kai croaks suddenly, startling the hell out of Taemin. Kai moves. Hm, he doesn’t feel as bad as before. Perhaps he can sit up? He tries. “I’m alive. I’m good. I’m here. Hello.”

“Oh god,” Taemin lets out a huge breath of relief, and helps Kai in his endeavor of sitting up, a gentle hand on his back. Right now, Taemin is like a nurse. It’s hard to believe that this individual could be classified as ‘very dangerous’ by anyone. “You weren’t responding to anything. You barely even moved your eyes. I thought I was going to lose you.”

Affection chokes Kai up. This is Taemin. Definitely Taemin. “I’m good. I guess I was just, you know...” Kai gestures Taemin’s bullet wounds vaguely. Almost all of them are healed by then. “... thinking. About what you told me.”

Taemin’s face falls, morphing from relief to grief in a second. It’s hard to watch. He looks miserable beyond repair, to the point that Kai wishes he hadn’t said anything.

“I guess I did hit you too hard with that,” Taemin smiles feebly. “Sorry. I didn’t know how else to tell you. I couldn’t hide it either, not after what you told me that time.”

Kai nods. He understands. But there’s more that he needs to know. “How did you recover your memory?” He questions.

“The adrenaline helped me to access my system back up,” Taemin explains fluently, to Kai’s surprise. “It’s supposed to help me to enter battle-mode. I guess whatever issue I had with the memory stuff was fixed by that.”

Kai blinks. This is fascinating. “And—and the healing stuff,” he goes onto the next question. “How does it work? I mean, you bleed and all...”

“I’m not entirely mechanic,” Taemin explains patiently, equal parts didactic and depressed. “I have organic parts. Actually, I suspect I’m made more of organic parts than mechanic, since my skin, my circulation system, and my organs are pretty much identical to a human’s.” It’s strange for Kai to hear Taemin refers to humans as a group he’s not included in. “The difference is that my DNA is tweaked to produce new cells faster. Hence my abnormal healing ability.”

Kai makes an ‘oooh’ sound, feeling nothing but amazed and curious. How can any of that be real? “So you’re pretty much immortal, then?”

“I suppose I do age,” Taemin replies, a bit unsure. “But it’s hard to destroy my body. And heavens knows they tried,” he adds bitterly, and Kai’s attention is redirected.

“They?” Kai follows the cue immediately, head bubbling with new questions. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Taemin sighs. He might be tired of the questions, or he might be feeling whatever negative feelings he associates with whoever ‘they’ are. Regardless of any of those, Taemin tells a long, long story.

 

A quick summary of Taemin’s Long, Long Story™.

Titan’s government is a little trigger-happy, as most of the Saturnian system nations seem to be, and launched a secret project to engineer the perfect android, intelligent, invincible, and self-sufficient. The ultimate objective was, of course, war, mostly cold war, but war nonetheless. As a result of that ambition, Taemin – or MR10V, the first prototype of such androids – was born.

Taemin spent his days in a lab being assembled, disassembled, and then reassembled multiple times. Sometimes, he was aware of his surroundings, and could feel the people screwing his arms onto his torso; sometimes, he was ‘asleep’, as if dead on the cold table.

“At first, my thoughts were all jumbled up,” Taemin confesses to Kai, a bit troubled by the unpleasant memories. “My thought system wasn’t polished yet, so it was like I was hallucinating constantly. I thought of random words and made phrases out of them.”

“Like ‘squirrel watermelon doesn’t fly above the sentience’?” Kai chirps in, and the example is so absurd and yet so accurate that Taemin doesn’t even laugh.

“... something along those lines, yes.” he admits, and then finally cracks up, pausing to laugh for a while before carrying on.

When his ‘brain’ – the compact, extremely powerful computer that controls the entirety of Taemin’s body – was finally programmed correctly, Taemin started to act human at last. Scientists would go into his chamber to have conversations with him, all while other scientists observed everything through the large glass window that served as one of the chamber’s walls. Taemin was a newborn, but had the information bank of an adult. The scientists were constantly impressed at him.

Hard to tell why. They had created Taemin to be exceptional, and yet were awed at every little thing he did. Narcissism is a tricky thing to understand.

Taemin watched TV daily, on command, in order to learn by himself things that the programmers couldn’t be bothered to embed onto his system. He learned about the universal diaspora, about each one of the colonies, about major and minor diplomatic conflicts between them. He learned about agriculture, fungiculture, about trade and economy and the everyday lives of almost every kind of human. But one thing particularly fascinated him.

Earth.

Upon hearing about Earth the first time, through a TV show documentary called ‘Biomes of a Lost Past’, Taemin was immediately fascinated. None of his ‘parents’ ever found out why. No matter how much they researched, calculated, and theorized, Taemin’s particular admiration towards Earth remained unexplained.

“I was obsessed,” Taemin confesses, toying with his necklace distractedly. “I didn’t want to learn about anything else. I loved to hear how the people lived here, how nature behaved... I guess it was then that my dream to see a flower field was born.”

“Oh,” Kai sighs sadly.

Taemin also sighs. “Anyway...”

Anyway, in the last part of Taemin’s Long, Long Story™, he began to grow more and more restless at the lab. He wanted to go out and see life with his own eyes; see the sky, see the green and yellow and pink and white of real life, not just the ice-gray, ice-cold, washed-out laboratory. Scientists sense his restlessness, talk to him about it, but they do nothing about it but write down in reports. Taemin is free to walk around the lab now, and often steals parts of study samples of Earth.

“They’d bring... you know, this kind of junk,” he points at a nearby pile of debris, one that Kai can’t see properly, but has seen enough similar ones to know what he’s talking about. “Old objects, trinkets, pieces of nothing. I’d raid the samples in a regular basis. That’s where I got this,” he adds, holding his necklace up. “This is a nameplate from about four thousand years ago. I decided it’d be my name from then on.” A brief pause. Taemin laughs to himself. “I was so silly.”

Kai says nothing.

Meanwhile, politics happened. It’s too complicated to explain in a concise way, so let’s just leave it at that: politics happened. Politics happened, and the existence of the project was exposed to public, which caused an enormous uproar due to its semi-organic, semi-genetic, semi-illegal nature. The people rioted. The government did a lot of press conferences, all in vain. The people rioted even more. Eventually, the government decided to do the only thing they could think of to appease the opposition – terminate the project.

After all, despite the billions poured into it, the human beings that had slaved on over genetic engineering and computer programs, and the completely sentient form of life created by it, it wasn’t _that_ important of a project, right?

The lab opposed. The government took no shit from them, and temporarily shut the entire lab, only agreeing to open it up again once the android project people agreed to go. People from other areas of the lab were pitched against the project, and the pressure was too much. Eventually, they all gave in.

The records were destroyed. The experiments were archived. Taemin was sent to immediate termination. 

The end.

 

 

Kai blinks at the sudden silence. “And then?”

Taemin tilts his head to the side, not understand the demand. “And then nothing. I escaped. They chased me. They’d find me, and try to kill me, and I wouldn’t die and escape again. Eventually, they put a price on my head.”

“Ooh,” Kai nods, satisfied by that epilogue. So that’s the birth of Taemin’s story as a fifty-seven trillion woolong head. Fascinating. “And—okay, last question, I swear,” Taemin laughs, clearly not believing that promise. “Why did they call you Eve of the Future?”

“Easy one,” Taemin temporarily assumes the role of a professor at a school, as if trying to break through the gloom. “Because they synthesized me from stem cells of someone else. You could say I was born from someone’s bones. Just like Eve, from the bible, who was born from Adam’s rib.” He catches sight of Kai’s slightly confused face, and asks, “you do know that legend, don’t you?”

“Not the rib part,” Kai admits. “But this is pretty cool. So you’re like a superhuman.”

Taemin sighs. Oh no. He’s starting to get sad again. “I’m not a superhuman. I'm not human at all.”

“What about you is not human?” Kai assaults him immediately with yet another question.

“... you said that the previous question was the last one,” Taemin confronts him.

“You know what I mean!” Kai retorts. “Like, you have memories. You have feelings. You even make mistakes sometimes. Remember when you snorted mushroom cream through your nose that time?”

“Why do you even remember this,” Taemin whines, slightly humiliated.

“Because—look, I get you not thinking yourself as human,” Kai concedes to him. “But Eve was human, right? Wasn’t she?”

Taemin stares at him silently. Kai feels that his words aren’t having the impact he expected them to have – he wanted to wipe that sad ‘oh no I’m not human I’m not worthy’ feeling out of Taemin’s body. Maybe he’s not taking the right approach. Change tactics.

“And look, even if you’re not human,” it’s Kai’s new tactic. “What’s the problem? As a matter of fact,” oho, fancy words, “you’re much better than a human. You’re still alive after taking a shower of bullets. You run super fast, like, remember Charon?, and you have such good balance too. And you do calculus stuff. Even if you do snort food through your nose sometimes,” Kai adds, and Taemin almost laughs again. “What’s the problem, you know?”

“It’s not... it’s just...” Taemin tries to reply. Perhaps the hesitation could be a sign that Kai is getting to the point? “All of that... the way I think is just a result of a computer working. My heart is just a really complicated clock. My bones are all metal. When it comes down to it, I’m just a robot.”

“And when it comes down to it, I’m just dog poop,” Kai retorts immediately. “It’s all the same, right? All organic—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Taemin interrupts. “But hey, nice comparison.”

“Shut up! Listen to me,” Kai shouts in outrage. “Listen, just listen. It doesn't matter that you have some metal stuff in you. My neighbor back home had a metal arm _and_ a metal leg. It made a hellish noise when she moved, but guess what? Nicest person in the block.” Kai puts both of his hands on Taemin’s shoulders, pulling him closer. The wound hurts like fuck, but it doesn’t matter. “You’re still Taemin, and everyone loves you. Robot or not.”

Kai knows he’s hitting home. Taemin’s eyes are downcast, gleaming, and he looks... vulnerable. Moved, perhaps? Kai’s own heart flutters with several emotions. 

“I could malfunction at any moment...”

“So could I,” Kai throws back. “It’s called ‘getting sick’.”

“I...” Taemin trails off, out of things to say. His lips flutter, as if he was choosing words to say, and Kai gets this sudden, but not foreign, urge to kiss him.

Oh, hey, wait. 

This is probably a good chance.

“Look, Taemin. Seriously, look,” Kai pleads, one hand on Taemin’s cheek to gently raise his head for their eyes to meet. Kai’s heart is threatening to burst through his chest, but it doesn’t matter. This is more important. “I—please take what I say completely seriously, okay?” He’s once again holding Taemin’s shoulders with both his hands, and those hands are shaking. “I. I really, really like you, Taemin.” Shit, he said it. “Like, really. I really like you.”

Taemin’s eyes are filled to tears – have been, since Kai’s emotional pep talk from earlier – and now, one tear trickles down, slowly, as he smiles. “I like you a lot too,” he admits, and Kai feels like he doesn’t _understand_.

“No, like,” Kai has to say it again. Even though his face is already roasting in the flames of hell, he can’t leave it at this. “I like you enough to marry you. Like, for real. I... love you. You know? Yeah.”

The most awkward confession Kai has ever known off, doubtlessly. He wishes he could’ve confessed as smoothly as a soap-opera hero, gently stroking his love interest’s cheeks, a hand laced around their waist... well, it’s a bit too late now...

“Oh,” Taemin understands, at last, and Kai would be relieved if he wasn’t so !!! from the thrill of confessing. “I see. Maybe I love you too?”

Kai groans. “What do you mean by ‘maybe’?! Do you love me or not??”

“I’m sorry! The exact concept of love isn’t embedded to my system,” Taemin complains, his own cheeks a bit red as well, and Kai feels like ‘not embedded to my system’ will be regularly used by Taemin as an excuse from then on. “But I do like you, and marrying you isn’t a bad idea. Also, I ripped off a piece of my body to reconstruct yours.”

At that, Kai halts still. It’s all gone. The embarrassment is gone. “You’re kidding.”

“I wanted you to heal faster,” Taemin shrugs, and Kai takes a look at his own wound. It’s closed. It’s already scarring. When he looks at Taemin’s torso, there’s a giant scab right at the same spot Kai’s wound is. “I had to tear a piece of my liver off too, because yours was damaged by the bullet. I guess this could be called love.”

Kai doesn’t have good reasons to disagree with that.

 

 

As promised by Taemin’s overly precise info, all of their wounds are completely healed by the time the sun starts to rise. Upon seeing the dawn break right before his eyes, Kai becomes anxious with the time they’ve must spent down there, and with the possibility that Ravi might’ve deemed them dead and departed from Earth.

“Night on this particular area of Earth where we are lasts only twelve hours,” Taemin informs helpfully when Kai voices his worries in an almost incomprehensible rant. “If we get going now, we might reach the ship before Ravi decides to go.”

Kai feels a little relieved. Then, he notices something. “How do we get to the ship from here?” He asks, looking around for anything he might recognize. “I have no idea of where we are...”

Taemin’s silent grimace says everything.

So, despite being completely and absolutely lost, Kai decides to go with his gut instinct and drive in the direction he thinks might be the right one. Taemin, who has been up since the battle, has started to look bone-crushingly tired since his long, long story, so he sleeps, lying across the back of the cockpit, legs dangling from the side of the ship.

It’s a strange feeling, to have confessed to the one you like, Kai concludes as he drives. Most would think confessing would bring some kind of relief to the constant feeling of giddiness that loving someone causes, but, if it usually does bring relief, Kai did something wrong. He only feels giddier, more on edge than ever, as if he’d explode at any moment; the only difference is that he’s almost sickeningly happy most of the time.

“Loooove, this distant staaaar, my only solaaaaaace,” he sings to himself as he drives, and god, that song truly is awful, but he feels like singing and he can’t help it. “Looooove, this foreign feeliiiing, this vice of miiiiiiine.” He can’t sing for shit either.

Everything is beautiful to him. Earth’s sunrise, all blue and purple and pink and yellow, is beautiful. Earth’s ruins, comprised of things from broken computers to pipes, from broken bricks to whole dining tables, are beautiful. Earth’s murky soil is beautiful. He himself is beautiful. Taemin is beautiful. 

And eventually, he finds something even more beautiful than all that. 

“!!!!!!!!!” he screams silently as the thing he finds reveals itself before his eyes. He can’t believe it. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. “Holy shit! Taemin! Taemin, wake up!”

Taemin sleeps like dead. He barely breathes. Sometime in the future, that will really bother Kai, and he’ll grow used to watch Taemin sleep with dread, only to sigh in relief when the android breathes. That’s for the future, though; right now, Kai is too excited to notice it.

“Taemin, wake up!!” He insists, nudging Taemin on the arm rather violent, and Taemin wakes up in a startle, flailing his arms as if he was falling. “Look at this Taemin, seriously!!” 

Taemin sits up, completely awake and a bit alarmed. And he sees. And both of them are frozen looking at it, Kai with a smile, Taemin with his jaw slack.

It’s a flower field. A huge one, extending past Kai’s sight, of yellow nameless flowers growing in tall, thin stem; dense, like a carpet, and Kai has never been so excited, because the rest of Earth looked so... infertile. So devoid of life, that this is almost a miracle to his eyes.

And to Taemin’s... well, it’s literally a dream come true. 

“Oh my god,” Taemin says faintly, face still showing nothing but surprise. “Oh my GOD! KAI!” It’s all the warning Kai receives before Taemin literally jumps off the ship and runs towards the field. Kai almost has a heart attack.

“Jesus fuck Taemin the soil—”

“Who cares!” Taemin shouts back at him, laughing and laughing and laughing. “This is just—amazing! I could die right now!”

“Please don’t,” Kai mutters as he safely parks his mono.

“Come on!” Taemin beckons him as he blindly runs into the flower field, which could easily be a poisonous swamp of some sort, but Kai chooses to just follow him, because he won’t have a chance like this so soon – or ever.

To Kai’s surprise, the soil of the field is relatively firm, not as murky as he thought it’d be; this could possibly mean they’re going in the wrong direction, away from the ocean rather than towards it, but, honestly, who cares! Flowers! Taemin is already spinning around wildly, touching as many flowers as he can with his spread arms.

“This is amazing,” he chants as he runs around.

“For god’s sake, wait for me!” Kai feels like he’ll be chasing Taemin for centuries. Taemin runs and skips and twirls and Kai is getting a bit tired of running already, so, when Taemin stops moving away for one split second, Kai seizes his chance and sprints towards the android, tackling him to the floor.

“HA!” he yells savagely.

“Aaaaah you caught me!” Taemin feigns a lament, actually smiling from ear to ear, breathless and gleaming. “I’m so happy. You have no idea.”

Kai wants to kiss him. He really wants to kiss him. So he kisses him, without a warning, chastely and quickly; it’s not a particularly grand kiss, nor do fireworks explode in the sky while cathartic music plays, like in the soap operas, but it’s been so long due for Kai that he’ll probably never forget that one kiss. 

“I’m happy too,” he says afterwards, leaning his forehead against Taemin’s, and his chest and throat feel tight with sheer, pure happiness. “I’m so happy I could die right now. Seriously.”

“Don’t die,” Taemin whispers at him, raising his head slightly, as if subtly chasing Kai’s lips. “Let’s live. Let’s have that pet shelter together someday.”

Just as Kai is about to reply, both of them hear a bark in the distance. It surprises them enough for their smiles to fall.

Awkward pause. “Do you think these flowers are hallucinogenic?” Taemin theorizes.

“I’m not sure anymore,” Kai confesses as he starts hearing the sound of an engine. 

Despite the initial disbelief, the sounds are so clear and feel so real that they don’t resist looking around for a source. Kai rolls to the side, to allow Taemin to get up, and both of them get to their feet really, really slowly, glancing around with something akin to fear.

It seems like the day is out to surprise them the most it can. In the distance – about seventy meters away from where they are – there comes Ravi’s mono.

“Yes!!” Kai shouts victoriously. Ravi has come to save them! They’re not risking being stranded anymore! “Ravi!! Here!”

“So he was looking for us!” Taemin comments, jumping and waving to the car. “We’re so lucky!”

“We really are!” Kai comments, and, as the mono gets closer enough for him to see who’s piloting, he adds, in a completely different voice: “Wait, what the fuck?”

It’s not Ravi who’s driving. It’s... at the steering wheel, it’s Jjanggu, who’s stepping on Monggu for leverage. Kai and Taemin stop waving. The car gets close enough for them to climb up and stops, and Jjangah pops up from the pedal area.

“Woof!” She says.

Kai and Taemin exchange a look.

“Woof!!” Jjanggu agrees, climbing off the steering wheel to jump over the seat. “Woof woof!”

The other two soon join Jjanggu behind the seat, waiting obediently for Kai and Taemin to climb onto the car. Monggu has some hardship jumping over the seat, as he’s bigger than the other two and not much of an exercise dog, but he manages. The two humans are still too dumbfounded to move.

At last, Kai turns to Taemin and says: “I guess it makes sense to deal this kind of dog.”

Taemin nods. “I guess it does.”

 

 

They drive back to the Kiev with the dogs; Kai drives Ravi’s mono, while Taemin drives Kai’s. It’s the first time Taemin tries his hand at driving, but, since he was built to learn and has seen Kai pilot that thing often enough, he does it pretty well.

It takes them the day to arrive. By the time they’re entering the garage, the sun is setting. Kai couldn’t, and wouldn’t, ever get used to those short ass days—

“FUCK YOU!” Ravi screams as he tackles Kai, laughing while Kai screams, getting him into a surprise chokehold. “Man, I thought you had really cashed in your chips this time. I had no idea what to do.”

“Aww,” Kai coos sardonically, still being choked. “How sweet! Now let me go.”

Ravi does let go, and goes off to hug Taemin. “So good to see you two, seriously. I thought I’d have to stay alone in this ship for life. And without a car,” he shoots the dogs a nasty glare. “Can you believe the fucking dogs stole my fucking car?”

“We can’t, actually,” Taemin admits. “But they seem to have done that indeed.”

“And they did. Well, you come in for a meal. You were away for quite a while,” Ravi pushes them out of the garage, into the main deck, and the dogs follow, barking and running in their usual silly manner. Kai can’t believe he’s home again.

And the day pulls out his last shock card before turning into night;

“You!” Kai yells when he spots Timoteo lying on the couch. “You’re alive!!”

“You can bet on it,” Timo snickers maliciously, barely turning his head to look at them. “Alive as always. And hello there, Taeminnie! You got a rash?”

“It’s... hard to explain.” Taemin’s multiple bullet wounds are now faint scars, and they do look like a rash to anyone who doesn’t know better. “And you? You look...”

“Almost dead,” Ravi fills in for him, walking past everyone to get to the kitchen. “This one got shot. Was white as a corpse when I found him.”

Timoteo starts laughing almost convulsively. “Oh guys, you have to hear this. I was down there, bleeding like hell and presumed dead, when that guy over there,” he tries to signalize Ravi with his head, but it’s such a feeble nod that it’s nothing, “came in a flying saucer-looking shit to save me. I laughed so hard I think I burst my main veins open. You guys should’ve seen him.”

“I saved your ass!!” Ravi objects, genuinely outraged. “I patched you up! I see now that should’ve left you down there!”

“What did you do to the security module though?” Kai asks, being familiarized with the ‘flying saucer-looking shit’ a.k.a. security module of the ship. “Ditched it?”

“Left it there,” Ravi admits. “I didn’t have time to bring it up again. That guy over there,” he signalizes Timoteo with a vague gesture of his hand, “was bleeding his guts out. So we came back up in my car.” He pauses, making a face. “Then, the fucking dogs stole it. My car have been getting stolen a lot these days, doesn’t it.”

“You got shot on the chest?” Taemin asks, attracting Kai’s attention. When he takes a closer look to Timo, he notices that the swindler has a patch over his chest. A considerably big one. It must’ve been bad.

“Yeah. Shot through the heart,” Timo jokes. “And then, my prince charming came to my rescue. Romantic, right?”

“Yeah,” Taemin laughs, stealing a glance at Kai, and their eyes accidentally meet. It’s enough to make Kai’s heart skip a beat, and he wonders if Timoteo hears it, because his gaze turns sharper, and he shifts his position to face them fully.

“How about you, though?” he asks, eyes going back and forth from Taemin to Kai. “I heard you went to the battlefield as well. What happened then? I want to hear.”

Ah. It’s Time, then. Kai and Taemin exchange a glance; they’ll have to talk about That much sooner than expected. Regardless of how reluctant both of them are to touch the subject so soon, Timo got shot trying to protect them, and Ravi is their captain. They deserve some explanations. 

“Ravi,” Kai calls, a bit solemn. “Come here.”

Ravi turns around to look at him. “I’m making dinner.”

“Dinner can wait,” Kai declares, and Ravi is visibly puzzled. “Come here. This is important.”

By then, Ravi is already frowning with worry. He leaves the kitchen area and, as if sensing he should sit down to listen, chooses a seat on the couch, where Timo’s legs are lying limply.

“What is it?” he urges, completely serious.

Kai and Taemin exchange another look. Who’s gonna do it?, they ask each other telepathically. Leave it to me, Kai silently says with a nod, and turns to face the other two.

“Uh...” he starts off hesitantly, and goes on to tell a Long, Long Story.

 

 

Ravi and Timo take the news surprisingly well. Ravi seems to have low-key thought Taemin was an android all along, and showers him with questions about his composition, which Taemin, egged on by Ravi’s awe, answers professionally. Timo just nods a lot.

“Amazing how much sense it makes,” he repeats to himself. “Truly amazing.”

Kai doesn’t tell any of them about his relationship status change with Taemin. He’s sure they’ll figure it out eventually.

Later on, they eat dinner together, watch some quiz shows and today’s edition of _Jack ‘n’ Jill_ , in which they announce an increase on Taemin’s price, shooting up from fifty-seven to sixty-two trillion woolongs.

“Woohoo!!” They celebrate for no reason.

“I wish my price would inflate,” Timoteo sighs. “I’d turn myself in if it was worth it. I’d pay off my debts with interest and shit.”

Afterwards, Ravi does his daily check up on Timo’s healing condition, which remind them all that, despite being as chirpy and insufferable as always, Timo has a bullet hole where part of his heart should be, and therefore needs to be handled with care. Both Kai and Taemin leave Ravi and Timo to themselves during the medical check up, and find themselves petting the dogs in the sleeping chambers hallway, sitting on the cold metal floor side by side.

“You know,” Taemin says after a while, tone nonchalant. “That was my first kiss.”

Kai widens his eyes, hands slowing down on Monggu’s fur. “Well, obviously...? It’d be really fucked up if someone—”

“No, like, ever,” Taemin interrupts, apparently struggling with words at the moment. “Not just on the lips, you know. I had never been kissed anywhere on my body.”

“Oh,” Kai comprehends, at least. He feels his cheeks heat up from Taemin’s announcement, even though he _knows_ Taemin meant the cheek or something, he _knows_. “Then. Yay! Super yay?”

“I don’t have any info on intimate touching, at all,” Taemin complains, and it’s getting difficult to not see sexual subtext on what Taemin is saying. “The scientists probably didn’t think I’d need it. Either that, or they expected me to learn it by myself someday.” He glances up to Kai rather... expectantly.

Kai’s heart hammers against his rib, once again, for the millionth time since he has fallen for Taemin. It’s getting real old, and yet, it still distresses him.

“So?” he manages to ask, not sure of what he’s supposed to be understanding.

“So,” Taemin is determined, and his voice says ‘just curious’, but then he grins, and his grins spells, among many other things, ‘mischievous’. “Teach me.” 

 

 

“Oh,” Taemin exclaims at pretty much everything, not exactly a moan, but an interjection of pleasant surprise. It’s usually followed by a softer, much lewder, “ _Oh_.”

Kai is having the time of his life.

“How’s this?” he asks before giving Taemin’s nipples an experimental lick, the very tip of his tongue teasing the now hardened bud. Taemin’s answer is a choked breath.

“Pretty good,” he comments, thighs twitching slightly against Kai’s own. Taemin is down to his boxers, cotton thin things that allow Kai to feel Taemin’s dick against his navel and drive him into being a tad slutty. “Hm, really good.”

“Good?” Kai repeats, now traveling downwards with his mouth, tasting the slight salty flavor of Taemin’s skin. Taemin’s flesh is firm, and warm, and all Kai wants to do right now is to take it slowly, to appreciate every second till he can’t stand it anymore.

“Hmm,” Taemin hums, and, when Kai grazes his teeth on his navel, “ _Ooh_ ,” he yelps as he bucks his hips. Taemin’s underwear bulges up against Kai’s chest. Kai is about to go insane.

“Fuck, Taemin,” he curses as his hands caress the inner part of Taemin’s thighs, not touching, not touching _yet_ , and it’s so hard to hold it back. “I love you. I really love you.”

Taemin chuckles breathlessly, getting leverage on his elbows to look at Kai in the eye. “So this is what love is, then?”

“This, _and_ tearing your liver off for someone,” Kai corrects him, and, as Taemin laughs loudly at that, he adds, “and much more. So much more, you’ll see.”

At that, Taemin hums, both just pleased and sexual-pleased. “I’m looking forward to it,” he whispers, a hand of his caressing Kai’s hair and cheeks. “You’ll teach me, right?”

Kai nods vigorously, hands now circling the bulge of Taemin’s erection quite tightly. Ah, his naughty hands... “Step by step,” he promises, inching his fingers closer to the waistband of that one last piece of clothing. “I’ll teach you everything.”

 

 

 

 

A short epilogue, set a Terrestrial month after the Earth incident:

 

Ravi and Kai are sitting side by side on the couch, watching _Jack ‘n’ Jill_. For some reason, bounty heads have been popping up here and there like they’re the plague, but most of them are either terribly cheap or too hard to capture.

“That one sounds good,” Kai points at a bald scary-looking woman.

“Up in Umbriel. It’d be like chasing one rat in a mouse farm,” Ravi retorts. “Two thousand? Not worthy.”

Kai fumes briefly. “And that one?” he points at the gang Jill is talking about at the moment, a bunch of teenagers with scandalous hair colors and sparkly suits.

“Looks pretty good, but they’re too many. It’d be really hard to catch,” Ravi shrugs. “If you think we can...”

Kai fumes a little more. “I do think we can.”

“Then add them to the list. They were last seen in Rhea.”

“Rhea!” Kai pretty much howls. “Fuck Rhea!”

“Hey, money is money. And you’re the one who suggested them,” Ravi says. Kai fumes even more.

“We should’ve turned that little shit Timoteo in when we had the chance...” Kai curses under his breath.

Ravi sighs. “Can’t do anything about it now, can you?”

Timoteo is gone. As soon as his wound healed, he did what he always does when he stays over at the Kiev; he lingered around for a while, ate some meals, then stole shit and ran away. This time, he had stolen a whole lot of food from the kitchen, Kai’s very own toolbox (the fit Kai threw when he found out it had been stolen was magnificent), fuel for his mono, and some of Ravi’s gadgets. Once again, Timoteo knew how to make people love or hate him at his will.

“Next time we’ll do it,” Kai promises.

“Next time,” Ravi joins into the pledge.

But they never do.

“Guys,” Taemin interrupts their argument a bit carefully. He’s lying on the floor, big headphones on his ears, a laptop right before his hands. “Got one thousand for this match. How much more?”

With his movements outside the ship limited by the possibility of being spotted by the police once again, Taemin had found solace in the ship, and, with it, had also found a way to make money: online professional chess matches. With a brain much more advanced in the calculus part than the usual human being, Taemin is an ace at chess, and most card games as well, even though he’s shit at poker for some reason. He makes the most money he can; it’s not much, but it’s enough.

“Ooh, so you won again,” Kai grins, rolling out of the couch to lie down by Taemin’s side. “Impressive.”

“Well, as expected,” Taemin grins cheekily, bumping his head against Kai’s affectionately, even though he does it a bit harder than necessary. “I do calculus stuff. That’s my thing.” Then, he shatters the moment before Kai can take the chance to kiss him, turning to Ravi to ask, “Should I play another match? I could get one in two hours.”

“You can rest now, Taemin. Sorry for relying on you like this,” Ravi apologizes, shamed as a captain. “You’ve done enough for us. I’ll get some fungi at the market to put in the soup next time.”

“Speaking of soup,” Kai rises a little from the floor to sneak a peek at the kitchen, a bit concerned. “Are you sure dinner will turn out well...?”

Ravi shrugs. “They can fetch a stick. They can play twister, despite being colorblind. They can pilot a fully-armed heavy ass car,” he declares, also taking a look at the kitchen. “I’m pretty sure these dogs can cook a meal just fine.”

Yes, the dogs are cooking dinner. What a time to be alive.


End file.
